Sister Mary drew her brows together. "The name? Yes, but it has escaped me. It was an English name if I recall rightly, something like—Long—no—yes—it was Longley or Longdon, something sounding like that."
Never in her life had Jo fainted, but she feared she was going to do so now. The bare little room was effaced as though a huge, icy blackness engulfed it. In the darkness a clock on a shelf ticked madly, dashingly, like blow upon blow on iron.
"Here is a glass of water, Mam'selle, you are ill."
Sister Mary pressed the glass to Jo's lips and she drank it to the last drop.
"I have nursed this girl through a long sickness," she explained. "I am tired. But I will keep her. Tell Sister Angela to make arrangements and let me know."
"Very well, Mam'selle. And the girl, Marie; she remembers, Sister Angela says. 'Tis a miracle. I shall miss her, but God has been kind to her."
"She will remember only what I tell her, from now on!" Jo set her teeth over her tingling tongue. "And now, I must go."
Mam'selle almost expected to find it dark when she went out from the dim room, but it was broad daylight, and when she looked at the clock in the church tower she saw that she had been but an hour inside.
In all the years of her life she had never experienced half so much as she had during the space of time with the two Sisters. She was conscious of trying to keep what she had heard in the Home, out of her mind; she was afraid to face it in the open. There were children playing about; a Sister or two looked at her curiously; she must be alone before she dared take her terrible knowledge into consideration. Gravely she went to the caleche, stiffly she took the reins and clicked to Molly. A mile from St. Michael's, much to Molly's disgust, they turned from the main road and struck into a wood trail where the snowy slush made travel difficult. Jo did not go far, she merely wanted to hide from any chance passerby. Then she let the reins drop in her lap and staring straight ahead—thought!
It was growing cold, that dead cold that comes when the mercury is dropping. But Jo was back in the summer time of her life, she was studying Langley, and the woman who had lured him, with the mature power that suffering years had later evolved in Jo herself. By some psychic force she seemed able to follow them far, far. So far she went in imagination that she saw the "white high-tops" changing from shade to shade. Jo, who had never been fifty miles from her birthplace, went far in that hour!