"Strangers walk as friends, And friends as strangers; Where whispers overheard betray false hearts, And through the mazes of the crowd we chase Some form of loveliness that smiles and beckons, And cheats us with fair words, only to leave us A mockery and a jest; maddened--confused-- Not knowing friend from foe!" The mother superior gazed with dilated eyes as he poured out the moving story, clasped her long, white hands excitedly, and shuddered with horror. "Ah, _mon Dieu_! the wicked man! the cruel, heartless woman!" she exclaimed. "Shall they not answer for this crime?" "Ay, before Heaven, they shall!" Pierre Carmontelle vowed passionately, with his warm, living hand pressed upon the chill, pulseless one of the nameless dead girl; and in the years to come he kept that impulsive vow made there in the presence of the living and the dead. CHAPTER XI. To return to Mme. Lorraine the night when Eliot Van Zandt lay like one dead before her door in a pool of his own blood, deserted by the brutal Remond, who had left him for dead upon the pavement. She had peeped from the window as Carmontelle had charged her with doing, although she had denied the accusation, and she had beheld all that passed. If she had not conceived a passion for Van Zandt, he might have perished, for all she would have cared; but something of womanly softness stole into her heart as she gazed, and she murmured: "Can he be dead, or only in a deadly swoon? What if I go and find out?" Glancing up and down the street to make sure that no one was in sight, she slipped out and knelt down by the prostrate form. Pushing back his coat and vest, she laid her hand over his heart. "There is some faint pulse. He lives, he lives!" she murmured, joyfully. "Now, now is my chance to act the good Samaritan. I will take him into my house, nurse him, tend him, and gratitude may win for me that which beauty and fascination failed to conquer." She hastily summoned a confidential servant, a woman who had been in her employ many years, and the repository of many strange secrets. Together they managed to convey the wounded, unconscious man into the house, although the domestic expostulated with every breath. "Hold your tongue, Mima. It is none of your business. You have only to obey my orders," madame returned, coolly. "The underground chamber, please. His presence is to be kept a secret. You and I will have the care of him--you are quite skillful enough, after your experience as a hospital nurse during the war, to attend his wound. He will be hidden here, while to the world he will have mysteriously disappeared." They laid him down on a couch in the wide hall, and Mima took a lamp and went out. Soon she returned, and stood before her mistress, huge, and tall, and dark, with a malignant scowl on her homely foreign face.