After awhile the "Mam’selle" was shortened to "Mam’sle," then, and quite unconsciously, to Mamsey. To that the girl clung always. And Jo, for no reason but a quaint whim, disdained the Marie by which the girl had been known and called her Donelle after poor Mrs. Morey who had died at Cecile’s birth. The winter after the ice storm settled down seriously. It had no more tantrums, but grew still and white and lonely. The snow was deep and glistening, the sky blue and cloudless and the pines cracked in the cold like the rifles of hunters in the woods. Donelle crept, a little, pale ghost, from the north chamber to the sunny living room. By putting her hand on Nick’s head she walked more steadily and laughed at the progress she made. Jo tucked her up on the hard couch under the glowing begonias and geraniums. "Good Mamsey! It’s like coming back from a far, far place," whispered the girl. As strength returned Donelle grew often strangely thoughtful. "I thought," she confided one night to Jo, "that when I was left alone I could remember, but I cannot." Then Jo took things in her own hands. She was always one to muster all the help in sight, and not be too particular. She was developing a deep passion for the girl she had rescued; she meant to see the thing through and _well_ through. As soon as she could she meant to go to St. Michael’s and learn all that the Sisters knew of the girl’s past. She felt she had a power over them that might wring the truth from their frozen silence. Then she meant to use her last dollar in procuring the proper medical skill for the girl. There was a big doctor every summer at St. Michael’s Hotel; until summer Jo must do her best. As her nerves grew calm and steady the experiences of the night of Donelle’s crisis lost their hold. "She heard my name at the Home," Jo argued, "and I myself spoke it when she was the most frightened and on the verge of fever. In the muddle and confusion of delirium it came to the surface with the rest of the floating bits. That’s all." Still there was a lurking familiarity about the girl that haunted Jo’s most prosaic hours. It lay about the girl’s mouth, the way she had of looking at Jo as if puzzled, and then a slow smile breaking. Langley had that same trick, back in the spring and summer of the past. He would take a long look, then smile contentedly as if an answer to a longing had come. But something else caught and held Jo Morey’s attention as she watched the girl. That charm of manner, that poise and ease; how like they were to—but Jo dared not mention the name, for the hurt had broken out afresh after all the years! "But such things do not happen in real life," she argued in her sane, honest mind. "She wouldn’t have been hiding in those bushes just when I stopped to eat! I’m getting wild to fancy such things, wild!" So Jo turned from the impossible and attacked the possible, but as often happens in life, she confused the two.