The Guests of Hercules | Page 3

her white cheeks in four bright drops, which she hastily dried with the
back of her hand; and no more tears followed. When she was sure of
herself, she turned and saw a girl running to her from the house, a
pretty, brown-haired girl in a blue dress that looked very frivolous and
worldly in contrast to Mary's habit. But the bushes and the sundial, and
the fading flowers that tapestried the ivy on the old wall, were used to
such frivolities. Generations of schoolgirls, taught and guarded by the
Sisters of Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake, had played and whispered secrets
along this garden path.
"Dearest Mary!" exclaimed the girl in blue. "I begged them to let me
come to you just for a few minutes--a last talk. Do you mind?"
Mary had wanted to be alone, but suddenly she was glad that, after all,
this girl was with her. "You call me 'Mary'!" she said. "How strange it
seems to be Mary again--almost wrong, and--frightening."
"But you're not Sister Rose any longer," the girl in blue answered.
"There's nothing remote about you now. You're my dear old chum, just
as you used to be. And will you please begin to be frivolous by calling
me Peter?"
Mary smiled, and two round dimples showed themselves in the cheeks
still wet with tears. She and this girl, four years younger than herself,
had begun to love each other dearly in school days, when Mary Grant
was nineteen, and Mary Maxwell fifteen. They had gone on loving each
other dearly till the elder Mary was twenty-one, and the younger

seventeen. Then Molly Maxwell--who named herself "Peter Pan"
because she hated the thought of growing up--had to go back to her
home in America and "come out," to please her father, who was by
birth a Scotsman, but who had made his money in New York. After
three gay seasons she had begged to return for six months to school,
and see her friend Mary Grant--Sister Rose--before the final vows were
taken. Also she had wished to see another Mary, who had been almost
equally her friend ("the three Maries" they had always been called, or
"the Queen's Maries"); but the third of the three Maries had disappeared,
and about her going there was a mystery which Reverend Mother did
not wish to have broken.
"Peter," Sister Rose echoed obediently, as the younger girl clasped her
arm, making her walk slowly toward the sundial at the far end of the
path.
"It does sound good to hear you call me that again," Molly Maxwell
said. "You've been so stiff and different since I came back and found
you turned into Sister Rose. Often I've been sorry I came. And now,
when I've got three months still to stay, you're going to leave me. If
only you could have waited, to change your mind!"
"If I had waited, I couldn't have changed it at all," Sister Rose reminded
her. "You know----"
"Yes, I know. It was the eleventh hour. Another week, and you would
have taken your vows. Oh, I don't mean what I said, dear. I'm glad
you're going--thankful. You hadn't the vocation. It would have killed
you."
"No. For here they make it hard for novices on purpose, so that they
may know the worst there is to expect, and be sure they're strong
enough in body and heart. I wasn't fit. I feared I wasn't----"
"You weren't--that is, your body and heart are fitted for a different life.
You'll be happy, very happy."
"I wonder?" Mary said, in a whisper.

"Of course you will. You'll tell me so when we meet again, out in my
world that will be your world, too. I wish I were going with you now,
and I could, of course. Only I had to beg the pater so hard to let me
come here, I'd be ashamed to cable him, that I wanted to get away
before the six months were up. He wouldn't understand how different
everything is because I'm going to lose you."
"In a way, you would have lost me if--if I'd stayed, and--everything had
been as I expected."
"I know. They've let you be with me more as a novice than you could
be as a professed nun. Still, you'd have been under the same roof. I
could have seen you often. But I am glad. I'm not thinking of myself.
And we'll meet just as soon as we can, when my time's up here. Father's
coming back to his dear native Fifeshire to fetch me, and I'll make him
take me to you, wherever you are, or else you'll visit me; better still.
But it seems a long time to wait, for I really did come back here to be a
'parlour boarder,' a heap