Then, after some further deliberation, in which one of the voices seemed to be protesting that it was afraid of something, the nun who had come first disappeared,--I could hear the sound of her feet hastening away,--and the second opened the grating and drew me in. She led me down a narrow, musty-smelling hall and into a dull little room where she made me sit down, and put my hat straight, and smoothed my hair very kindly but rather clumsily with hands like white pincushions. At last, with the timid nun following furtively at her heels, the Mother Superior came. She was a thin woman in flowing robes, with a great white sheer coif around her delicate face; and she looked at me very kindly and benevolently while I stammered out the essentials of my story--how the Spanish Woman had tried to keep me in her house, and how I got out of the window and through a hole in the wall and so down into the garden. When I came to this point in my tale, "But those windows are closed up!" cried one of the nuns. "And the wall is eight feet!" cried the other, "and there is no hole in it! It would be impossible!" The Mother Superior shook her head at them, and said to me: "Can you tell me where you live, my child?" I thought it odd that there should be any doubt in her mind as to that, but I eagerly gave her the number and the street. "And if you will only send for a carriage," I said, "because I am afraid I am too tired to walk, I should like to go home." "It will be best to notify your parents," she said in a soothing voice, "and they will fetch you away." "But there is no one there now, except Abby, and she is lame and very old. Father is not in town. He will not be back until night, and I can perfectly well go home alone!" I was beginning to feel desperate, as I thought I never should get out of the place. She smiled and said, "Well, we will see! Give me your father's name." She looked surprised when she heard it and not quite as if she believed me, but all she said was, "Now you must lie down and rest a little while before you go out." I protested that I did not feel tired, and indeed my anxiety to get away had wiped out all memory of my bruises. But in the end I had to follow the round-faced nun up the bare, cement stairway to another small room. It seemed strange after the luxurious glooms of the Spanish Woman's house, to be in this bare, whitewashed place, where all the light fell unobstructed through little, narrow windows placed high up in the walls. There were no mirrors here, not one, to reflect one's figure; and it was only when I had taken off my hat that I discovered what a wreck it was, crushed absurdly out of shape; and my hair was half down. The nun helped me to unwind and brush it out, and I heard her murmuring at my back, "When I was young my hair was as long as this."