The instant she caught sight of the tall, slight, youthful-looking figure in gray, the three years fell away like a crumbling wall, and gave back the days of the "three Maries." No, the silvery blond hair had not faded or lost its sparkle.
Mary Grant, in her short gray skirt and coat, with her lovely hair in an awkwardly done clump at the nape of a slender neck, looked a mere schoolgirl. She was twenty-four, and nearing her twenty-fifth birthday. Of late, she had had anxieties and vigils, and the life of a novice of Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake was not lived on down or roses: but the tranquil years of simple food, of water-drinking, of garden-work, of quiet thinking and praying had passed over her like the years in dreams, which last no longer than moments. They had left her a child, with a child's soft curves and a child's rose-leaf skin. Yet she looked to Peter very human now, and no saint. Her large eyes, of that golden gray rimmed with violet, called hazel, seemed to be asking, "What is life?"
Mary Grant
Peter thought her intensely pathetic; and somehow the fact that new shoes had been forgotten, and that Mary still wore the stubby, square-toed abominations of her novitiate, made her piteous in her friend's eyes. 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.