When we'd seen all the sights and were tired of shopping, she remembered that she'd got a niece staying in the country not far away, on the Hudson River. I'd heard Mamma speak of her sister, who, when seventeen, had married a Savant (whatever that is), and had gone to California soon afterwards, because she was delicate. But evidently the change hadn't done her much good, because she died when her baby was born. The Savant went on living, but he couldn't love his daughter properly, as she'd been the cause of her mother's death. Besides, he wasn't the kind of man to understand children, so when Madeleine was nine or ten, he sent her to a school--a very queer school. It was kept by a Sisterhood; not nuns exactly, because they were Protestants, but almost as good or as bad; and an elderly female cousin of the Savant's was the head of the institution. There Madeleine Destrey had been ever since, though Mamma said she must be nineteen or twenty; and now her father was dead. That news had been sent to Mamma months before we left Denver, but as she and the Savant had written to each other only about once every five or six years, it hadn't affected her much. However, she thought it would be nice to go and see Madeleine, and I thought so too. It was a short journey in the train, and the place where the Sisterhood live is perfectly lovely, the most beautiful I ever saw, with quantities of great trees on a flowery lawn sloping down to the river. I was wondering what my cousin would be like--the only cousin I've got in the world; and though Mamma said she must be pretty, if she was anything like her mother, I didn't expect her to be half as pretty as she really is. We surprised her as much as she did us, for naturally she expected Mamma to be like other aunts, which she isn't at all--now; and evidently she considered me a _curiosity_. But she was very sweet, and when she found Mamma didn't want to be called Aunt Kathryn, she tried hard always to "Kitty" her. We only intended to spend the day, but it turned out that the time of our visit was rather critical for Maida. She was in the act of having her twentieth birthday; and it seemed that in her father's will he had "stipulated" (that's the word the cousin-Mother-Superior used) that his daughter should be sent to travel in Europe when she was twenty, for a whole year. The reason of the stipulation was, that though he didn't care for Maida as most fathers care for their children, he was a very just man, and was afraid, after living so long in the Sisterhood his daughter might wish to join the Order, without knowing enough about the outside world to make up her mind whether it truly was her vocation for good and all. That was why she was to go to Europe; for when you're twenty-one you can become a novice in the Sisterhood, if you like.