As the day of the breaking-up drew nearer, discipline insensibly relaxed, and Queenie suddenly became less averse from responding in some degree to Alex' wistful advances.
On the last day, one of broiling heat, the two spent the afternoon alone together unrebuked, in a corner of the great verger where the pupils were scattered in groups, feeling as though the holidays had already begun.
"I shall have the journey with you," said Alex, piteously.
"Madame Hippolyte is taking us over, with one of the lay-sisters," said Queenie, naming the most vigilant of the older French nuns. "So it will be much better if we don't talk together on the boat. You know there will be the three Munroe girls as well, because they are going to spend their holidays in Devonshire or somewhere."
"How do you know it will be Madame Hippolyte?" said Alex disconsolately.
The authority deputed to conduct pupils on the journey to and from Liège was one of the many items in the convent curriculum always shrouded in impenetrable mystery until the actual moment of departure.
"I overheard two of them talking about it, in the linen-room this morning," placidly said Queenie. "I kept behind the door."
Part of her curious attractiveness was, that she never attempted to disguise or deny certain practices which Alex had been taught to consider as dishonourable.
Alex counted this as but one more stone in the edifice erected for the worship of her idol. It was not until she saw Queenie Torrance long after, in other relations and other surroundings, that she dimly realized how much of that streak of extraordinary candour was the direct product of a magnificently justified self-confidence in the potency of her own attraction, needing no enhancement from moral or mental attributes.
"Do you always live in London, Alex?"