CHAPTER III.
THE LOST ONE.
And where all this time was Alison Cheyne, after whom—as the chief of our dramatis personæ—we must needs look now?
When consciousness returned to her, after wildly grasping the bell in the porte-cochère of a large house on that night of snow and terror, and when, fluttering, her white eyelids unclosed, after what seemed a long sleep, she looked round her like a little scared bird, in utter bewilderment, and, believing that she was dreaming, closed them again.
A bell ringing at a distance roused her, and she looked again, and became convinced that what she looked on was no dream, and her eyes wandered about with a dazed expression.
She was in a little room, with whitewashed walls, and a floor of plain polished wood, on which lay a tiny patch of faded carpet. The sunbeams were creeping through the closed blinds, and a fire burned cheerfully in a little black iron stove. She lay in a pretty bed, with the softest of pillows and sheets; it was of plain iron, and without curtains.
Above the mantelpiece, in a simple frame, hung an engraving from Rubens' picture of 'St. Theresa interceding for the Souls in Purgatory,' the three principal souls being—in a spirit of waggery—faithful portraits of the artist's three wives. On one side of this was a little Madonna on a bracket, with a red crystal lamp hung before it; on the other a crucifix, below which was a tiny font of Antwerp china.
Other ornaments—save a few flowers in a vase—the apartment had none, and its furniture—two cane-seated chairs and a deal table—was of the simplest kind.
In one of the chairs sat a young woman dressed like a nun, with a black robe and white hood, a large bronze crucifix and wooden beads at her cord girdle; her down-cast face had a sweet, placid, and even beautiful expression, and she was sedulously working, with the whitest of hands, at a large piece of gold embroidery on cloth of silver—a portion of a priest's vestments apparently, while glancing attentively from time to time down on her patient or up at two pretty little love-birds in a brass cage.
Alison took in all these details at one rapid glance, and great terror seized her that something strange had befallen her, that she was in the care of a nursing sister.