"My good child, what do you mean?" inquired the abbess, uneasily.
"Mother, I feel as if I were haunted!" said Salome, with a shudder.
"Come! your nerves have been overtasked. You must have a composing draught, and go to bed," said the superior, decisively.
"It may be that I am nervous and excitable, and that I have conjured up this image in my brain—such a ghastly, ghostly image, mother! It could not have been real, though I thought nothing else this morning than that it was real. But this evening—oh! madam, if you had seen it, with its blanched face and glazed eyes, like a sceptre risen from the grave!"
"I have not seen the man yet, either this morning or this evening," said the elder lady, as she drew the younger's arm within her own.
"No, you have never seen him. I have no one's eyes but my own to test the matter. You have never seen him, and that is another reason why I think of the man as ghostly or unreal," whispered Salome.
They were now in the long passage leading from the chapel to the cells.
"I will take you again to your own little room in the Infants' Asylum," murmured the lady, as she turned with her protegee into the rectangular passage leading to the asylums.
She took Salome to the door of the house, gave her a benediction, and left her.
"Out there I have trouble, here I shall have peace," muttered the young woman, as she entered the children's dormitory, where every tiny cot was now occupied by a little, sleeping child.