"Go tell Mathurin to raise the curtain," said the Reverend Mother hurriedly in a low tone to Mademoiselle Vivier; a command which Mademoiselle Vivier lost no time in executing. CHAPTER XVIII Marise had noticed as she left the stage, that Madame Garnier was there with her son,--oh, yes, Danielle _had_ said her brother was back from America. Now he'd be tagging around everywhere, tied to his mother's apron-strings, as Papa said all young Frenchmen were. Yes, they were holding hands this minute. How Papa would laugh to see that, as much as he did when Frenchmen with beards kissed each other. And now he'd be everlastingly coming in with his tiresome mother on Maman's days at home, to fidget and stammer and drop his teaspoon. Oh, well, she thought with a superior condescension, he had been hardly more than a boy, just out of the lycee, only twenty-one. He might be better now. Perhaps he had got rid of a little of his shyness in New York; although twenty-three, for a _man_, was of course no age at all. The fashion at school just then, was to look down on boys and young men as green and insipid. The ideal of all the girls was an _old_ man of forty, with white hair, and black eyebrows, a little pointed gray beard, and such sad, sad eyes! Every girl was waiting for such a chance to devote herself to healing the wounds made by other women, faithless, heartless creatures who had ravaged his youth and destroyed his faith. To prove to him what a woman's fidelity and love could be, and then die in his remorseful arms, of slow consumption brought on by his neglect...! Or, as the pious ones had it, to bring him back to the Church, and have him become a monk after your death. Or, perhaps, as some of the more dramatic ones imagined the matter, to find a plot against his life, and to sacrifice yourself to defeat it, throwing back at the last moment the hood of your long dark cloak, and showing a beautiful white satin gown, stained with your heart's blood, as you gasped out, "For you, for you, adored Rene." The books from which the girls got these ideas, and many others not so harmless, were kept in a hole hidden behind a big loose stone in the end wall of the school garden. Though they were religiously wrapped in oil-cloth, the damp did more or less penetrate. But spots of green mold and limp damp pages which tore unless you held your breath as you turned them, only added to their charm as you read them, two or three heads bent over the page, while a friend kept guard at the turn of the path by the magnolia tree.