"It gave _me_ pleasure anyway. To be in the place where you had been so happy--" "Ah, but I am always happy," she interrupted. "Though indeed I was happy there, and sorrowful to leave it. But I did not leave it quite behind; it came with me." "I have a great many things to tell you. They remember you _most_ faithfully. If my going gave _me_ pleasure, it gave them much more. You cannot think how much they made of me for your sake; I stayed there a long time after Mass yesterday, and they made me go back in the afternoon--I was there all afternoon. And all the time we were talking of you." "Then I think," Mariquita declared, laughing merrily, "your talk will have been monotonous." "Oh, not monotonous at all. Are they not dear women? They showed me where you sat in chapel--and the different places where you had sat in classrooms, and in the refectory, when you first came, as a small girl of ten, and as you rose in the school." "I did not rise very high. I was never one of the clever ones--" "They kept that to themselves--" "Oh, yes! They would do that. Nuns are so charitable--they would never say that any of the girls was stupid." "No, they didn't hint that in the least. Sister Gabriel showed me a drawing of yours." "What was it?" "She said it was the Grand Canal at Venice. I have never been there--" "Nor I. But I remember doing it. The water wouldn't come flat. It looked like a blue road running up-hill. Sister Gabriel was very kind, very kind indeed. She used to have hay-fever." "So she has now. She listened for more than half-an-hour while I told her about you." "Mr. Gore, I think you will have been inventing things to tell her," Mariquita protested, laughing again. She kept laughing, for happiness and pleasure. "Oh, no! On the contrary, I kept forgetting things. Afterwards I remembered some of them, and told her what I had left out. Some I only remembered when it was too late, after I had come away. Sister Marie Madeleine--I hope you remember her too--she asked hundreds of questions about you." "Oh, yes, of course I remember her. She taught me French. And I was stupid about it...." "She was very anxious to know if you kept it up. She said you wanted only practice--and vocabulary." "And idiom, and grammar, and pronunciation," Mariquita insisted, laughing very cheerfully. "Did you tell her there was no one to keep it up with?" He told her of many others of the nuns--he had evidently taken trouble to bring her word of them all. And he had asked for news of the girls she had known best, and brought her news of them also. Several were married, two had entered Holy Religion. "Sylvia Markham," he said, "you remember her? She has come back to Loretto to be a nun. She is a novice; she was clothed at Easter. Sister Mary Scholastica she is--the younger children call her Sister Elastic."