"Rarely of any one except her grandmother," answered Sister Gudule, "and of her she told me very little. Whether her illness had blotted out the memory of her childhood, or whether she shrank from any allusion to the past, I cannot tell. One day I asked her who had given her a blue satin neckerchief which I found in her trunk—a costly neckerchief, and much too fine for a child to wear. She told me that it was a New Year's gift from her aunt, but at the mention of the name she turned deadly pale, her eyes filled with tears, and her whole body shook like an aspen-leaf. I changed the conversation that moment, and I never again heard her speak of her aunt."
"You would infer from her agitation that the aunt was connected with the tragedy of the child's life?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"Was perhaps the person whom she saw assailed when she cried out, 'Don't kill her; don't shoot her!'"
"I have thought that it must have been so. That dreadful cry of hers, 'Take away the blood! take away the dark forest!' No one who did not hear those cries of hers, no one who did not see the awful expression of her eyes, staring, dilated, full of horror; no one who had not seen and heard her as I did could ever understand how dreadful, how real that vision was to me as well as to the sleeper. I used to feel as if I had seen murder done, and had stood by without the power to prevent it."
"In a word, you felt, by pure sympathy, almost exactly what the child felt," said Heathcote.
Already he had begun to adore Sister Gudule, just as the children of the convent adored her. He forgot her hump, he forgave her the potato-shaped nose, he accepted her beard as a detail that gave piquancy to her countenance. He was subdued, subjugated by that intensely sympathetic nature which revealed itself in every word and look of the lay-sister.
But he had a task to perform, and it was necessary that he should proceed with his inquiries in a business-like manner. He had already taken certain notes in his pocket-book.
"Léonie Lemarque left you in 1879, and she had been with you eight years," he said, with pencil in hand. "She must have come to you in 1871."
"Yes, it was in 1871, not long after the troubles in Paris. It was early in November she was brought to us."