The American girl hotly repented not writing to her
father in New York and telling him that she must leave the convent with
Mary Grant. Probably he would not have consented, but she might have
found some way of persuading him to change his mind. Or she could have
gone without his consent, and made him forgive her afterward. Even now
she might go; but dimly and sadly she felt that Mary did not really wish
for her superior knowledge of the world to lean upon; Mary longed to
find out things for herself.
Peter did not sleep well that night, and when she did sleep she dreamed
a startling dream of Mary at Monte Carlo.
"She'll go there!" the girl said to herself, waking. "I know she'll go.
I don't know why I know it, but I do."
Trying to doze again, she lay with closed eyes; and a procession of
strange, unwished-for thoughts busily pushed sleep away from her brain.
She seemed to see people hurrying from many different parts of the
world, with their minds all bent on the same thing: getting to Monte
Carlo as soon as possible. She saw these people, good and bad, mingling
their lives with Mary's life; and she saw the Fates, like Macbeth's
witches, laughing and pulling the strings which controlled these
people's actions toward Mary, hers toward them, as if they were all
marionettes.
II
Lady MacMillan of Linlochtry Castle, who was a devout Catholic, came
often from her place in the neighbourhood to see her half-sister, Mother
Superior at the Convent of St.
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