"Nor I. But I remember doing it. The water wouldn't come flat. It looked like a blue road running up-hill. Sister Gabriel was very kind, very kind indeed. She used to have hay-fever."
"So she has now. She listened for more than half-an-hour while I told her about you."
"Mr. Gore, I think you will have been inventing things to tell her," Mariquita protested, laughing again. She kept laughing, for happiness and pleasure.
"Oh, no! On the contrary, I kept forgetting things. Afterwards I remembered some of them, and told her what I had left out. Some I only remembered when it was too late, after I had come away. Sister Marie Madeleine—I hope you remember her too—she asked hundreds of questions about you."
"Oh, yes, of course I remember her. She taught me French. And I was stupid about it...."
"She was very anxious to know if you kept it up. She said you wanted only practice—and vocabulary."
"And idiom, and grammar, and pronunciation," Mariquita insisted, laughing very cheerfully. "Did you tell her there was no one to keep it up with?"
He told her of many others of the nuns—he had evidently taken trouble to bring her word of them all. And he had asked for news of the girls she had known best, and brought her news of them also. Several were married, two had entered Holy Religion.
"Sylvia Markham," he said, "you remember her? She has come back to Loretto to be a nun. She is a novice; she was clothed at Easter. Sister Mary Scholastica she is—the younger children call her Sister Elastic."
"Oh," cried Mariquita, with her happy laugh, "how funny it is—to hear you talking of Sylvia. She was harum-scarum. What a noise she used to make, too! How pretty she was!"