"Sister Margaret is wonderful!" whispered Rosalind. "Aren't my clothes becoming? She found them and got me into them; and she has kept me away from Aunt Pat and taken me over the hard places wonderfully. I really don't know who I am," she laughed; "but it's quite clear that you have seen the difference. I must play up now and try to be brilliant—like Helen!" she said. "I can tell by the things in Helen's room, that I'm much less sophisticated. I found his photograph, by the way!"
"What!" I cried so abruptly that the others turned and looked at us. Rosalind laughed in honest glee.
"Mr. Gillespie's photograph. I think I shall keep it. It was upside down in a trunk where Sister Margaret told me I should find these pretty slippers. Do you know, this playing at being somebody else is positively uncanny. But this gown—isn't it fetching?"
"It's pink, isn't it? You said that photograph was face down, didn't you?"
"It was! And at the very bottom under a pair of overshoes."
"Well, I hope you will be good to him," I observed.
"Mr. Donovan," she said, in a mocking tone that was so like Helen's that I stared stupidly, "Mr. Donovan, you are a person of amazing penetration!"
As we sat down in the screened corner of the broad terrace, with the first grave approach of twilight in the sky, and the curved trumpet of the young moon hanging in the west, it might have seemed to an onlooker that the gods of chance had oddly ordered our little company. Miss Patricia in white was a picture of serenity, with the smile constant about her lips, happy in her hope for the future. Rosalind, fresh to these surroundings, showed clearly her pleasure in the pretty setting of the scene, and read into it, in bright phrases, the delight of a story-book incident.
"Let me see," she said reflectively, "just who we are: we are the lady of the castle perilous dining al fresco, with the abbess, who is also a noble lady, come across the fields to sit at meat with her. And you, sir, are a knight full orgulous, feared in many lands, and sworn to the defense of these ladies."
"And you,"—and Miss Pat's eyes were beautifully kind and gentle, as she took the cue and turned to Rosalind, "you are the well-loved daughter of my house, faithful in all service, in all ways self-forgetful and kind, our hope, our joy and our pride."