"And you succeeded, Sister," said the head of the convent approvingly. "I never saw a more wonderful cure. From a nervous hysterical child Léonie Lemarque grew into a bright merry girl." "Yes, with God's help she was cured; but the cure was very slow. The shock which shattered her health, and for a time impaired her mind, must have been an awful one. Never before had I seen gray hairs upon the head of a child, but the thickly curling hair upon Léonie's temples when she came to us was patched with white; and it was years before the hair resumed its natural colour. For the first year her memory was almost a blank. It would have been useless for any one to attempt to teach her in class with the other children. She would have been despised as an idiot, laughed at perhaps, and her heart broken. I obtained the Reverend Mother's permission to keep her in my room, and to teach her in my own way, and little by little I awakened her memory and her mind. Both had been, as it were, benumbed, frozen, paralysed, by that awful shock of which we know so little." "But you would guess that she had witnessed some dreadful scene, perhaps the death of some one she loved," speculated Heathcote. "Did she never talk to you of her childhood in Paris, her relatives?" "Rarely of any one except her grandmother," answered Sister Gudule, "and of her she told me very little. Whether her illness had blotted out the memory of her childhood, or whether she shrank from any allusion to the past, I cannot tell. One day I asked her who had given her a blue satin neckerchief which I found in her trunk--a costly neckerchief, and much too fine for a child to wear. She told me that it was a New Year's gift from her aunt, but at the mention of the name she turned deadly pale, her eyes filled with tears, and her whole body shook like an aspen-leaf. I changed the conversation that moment, and I never again heard her speak of her aunt." "You would infer from her agitation that the aunt was connected with the tragedy of the child's life?" "Yes, Monsieur." "Was perhaps the person whom she saw assailed when she cried out, 'Don't kill her; don't shoot her!'" "I have thought that it must have been so. That dreadful cry of hers, 'Take away the blood! take away the dark forest!' No one who did not hear those cries of hers, no one who did not see the awful expression of her eyes, staring, dilated, full of horror; no one who had not seen and heard her as I did could ever understand how dreadful, how real that vision was to me as well as to the sleeper. I used to feel as if I had seen murder done, and had stood by without the power to prevent it." "In a word, you felt, by pure sympathy, almost exactly what the child felt," said Heathcote.