“Why, of course! What else would have landed us at Tréport?” “I don’t know,” the girl indifferently replied. Lady Seton shrugged one shoulder, not in the acceptedly Gallic way, which she would have condemned, but in a slightly contemptuous fashion. “Be ready, bag and baggage, at a quarter to six, please, _without fail_. I’ll be glad to see you out of that ghastly black uniform--or whatever you call it! It is decidedly dowdy!” Laurence laughed, smoothed the straight alpaca folds falling from shoulder to ankle, and glanced at her aunt quizzically. “I am going to interview the Mother Superior,” pronounced the latter again, “and then I shall go, so that you may have an opportunity to take all the hysterical farewells you choose from your beloved friends here.” Hysterical! Laurence laughed once more her low, mocking laugh, and effaced herself before the rangey form of her aunt as her British ladyship set off, under full sail, sweeping past Madame Marie-Immaculée--still pacing monotonously up and down the hall, out of hearing, but in full sight of the _parloir_ door. “Poor Mother Superior!” Laurence mused, with piously raised eyes. “Poor Mother Superior! I hope my delightful aunt will have nothing but edifying things to say of me; she is not overburdened with tact, as a rule!” As she reascended the stairs she was suddenly met by a whirlwind of outstretched arms, flying golden hair, and skirts of alpaca like her own, which flung itself headlong upon her. “Laurence! Laurence! Have they come for you already?... Oh! Oh, Laurence!” The breathless sentence ended abruptly in a burst of whole-hearted sobs as Marguerite de Plenhöel clung desperately about her comrade’s neck. “_Voyons, mon petit_,” consoled Laurence, keeping her equilibrium with wonderful ease under the circumstances. “_Sois raisonnable!_” But the fifteen-year-old evidently was disinclined to listen to reason, at least just then, for she went on choking and gasping, and entreating betweentimes: “Don’t go away, Loris. Don’t leave me! Don’t!” “Hush! Hush, little one! Hush! Let’s slip into the garden. They’ll hear you if we stay here!” “We--ca--n’t--can’t go in--into ... the garden--with--out--permis--sion,” Marguerite convulsively objected. But Laurence was firm. “But, yes, we can. There’s nobody about now. Come quick!” she commanded, half dragging, half carrying Marguerite down-stairs again. And thus at last they reached a small postern opening from the north wing, and stopped only when, still clasping each other, they stepped into the wonderful _allée_ of lindens that skirts the cloisters on that side of the building. The sun filtering through the pale leafage made swaying spots of pink copper all over the decorously raked gravel; the heliotropes and old-fashioned verbenas and rose-geraniums filling the borders smelled sweet to heaven, and in a near-by bosquet of laburnum a green finch sang to burst his little throat (_à se rompre la gorge_).