She was their soprano, and she had to join them. She began first in a tremulous voice, but soon the spell of the music took hold of her, and carried her away, far, far above all earthly thoughts and cares, and she sang, as her hearers afterward declared, "like a seraph." At the end of the service she whispered to the abbess, calling her attention to the pallid stranger in the end pew; but when both turned to look, the man had vanished! "Mother, I do not know whether that ghostly figure was a real man, after all!" whispered Salome, in an awe-stricken tone. "My good child, what do you mean?" inquired the abbess, uneasily. "Mother, I feel as if I were haunted!" said Salome, with a shudder. "Come! your nerves have been overtasked. You must have a composing draught, and go to bed," said the superior, decisively. "It may be that I am nervous and excitable, and that I have conjured up this image in my brain--such a ghastly, ghostly image, mother! It could not have been real, though I thought nothing else this morning than that it was real. But this evening--oh! madam, if you had seen it, with its blanched face and glazed eyes, like a sceptre risen from the grave!" "I have not seen the man yet, either this morning or this evening," said the elder lady, as she drew the younger's arm within her own. "No, you have never seen him. I have no one's eyes but my own to test the matter. You have never seen him, and that is another reason why I think of the man as ghostly or unreal," whispered Salome. They were now in the long passage leading from the chapel to the cells. "I will take you again to your own little room in the Infants' Asylum," murmured the lady, as she turned with her protegee into the rectangular passage leading to the asylums. She took Salome to the door of the house, gave her a benediction, and left her. "Out there I have trouble, here I shall have peace," muttered the young woman, as she entered the children's dormitory, where every tiny cot was now occupied by a little, sleeping child. Salome prepared to retire, and in a few moments she also was at rest, with her little Marie Perdue in her arms. Christmas had come on Saturday that year. The next day being Sunday, there was another high mass to be celebrated in the chapel. Salome, as usual, joined the nuns' procession to the choir, where the sisterhood, as was their custom, took their seats some few minutes before the entrance of the priest and his attendants. With a heart almost pausing in its pulsations, Salome bent forward to peer through the screen upon the congregation, to see if by any chance the Duke of Hereward (or his ghost) sat among them. With a half-suppressed cry, she recognized his form, seated in the opposite corner of the church, from the spot he had last occupied. "He shifts his place every time he appears," she said to herself. And now, being determined that other eyes should see him as well as her own, she touched the abbess' arm and whispered: