Rosalind at Red Gate

by Meredith Nicholson

"I haven't a care or trouble in the world," declared Miss Pat when I left them at St. Agatha's. "I am sure that we have known the worst that can happen to us in Annandale. I refuse to be a bit frightened after that drive."

"It was charming," said Helen. "This is better than the English lake country, because it isn't so smoothed out."

"I will grant you all of that," I said. "I will go further and admit—what is much for me—that it is almost equal to Killarney."

There seemed to be sincerity in their good spirits, and I was myself refreshed and relieved as I drove into Glenarm; but I arranged for the same guard as on the night before. Helen Holbrook's double-dealing created a condition of affairs that demanded cautious handling, and I had no intention of being caught napping.

I am not, let me say, a person who boasts of his knowledge of human nature. Good luck has served to minimize my own lack of subtlety in dealing with my fellow-creatures; and I take no credit for such fortune as I have enjoyed in contests of any sort with men or women. As for the latter, I admire, I reverence, I love them; but I can not engage to follow them when they leave the main road for short cuts and by-paths. The day had gone so well that I viewed the night with complacency. I read my foreign newspapers with a recurrence of the joy that the thought of remote places always kindles in me. An article in The Times on the unrest in Bulgaria—the same old article on the same old unrest—gave me the usual heartache: I have been waiting ten years for something to happen in that neighborhood—something really significant and offering a chance for fun, and it seems as far away as ever.

From the window of my room I saw the Japanese boy patrolling the walks of St. Agatha's, and the Holbrooks' affairs seemed paltry and tame in contrast with the real business of war. A buckboard of youngsters from Port Annandale passed in the road, leaving a trail of song behind them. Then the frog choruses from the little brook that lay hidden in the Glenarm wood sounded in my ears with maddening iteration, and I sought the open.

The previous night I had met Helen Holbrook by the stone seat on the ridge, and I can not deny that it was with the hope of seeing her again that I set forth. That touch of her hand in the moonlight lingered with me: I thrilled with eagerness as I remembered how my pulses bounded when I found myself so close to her there in the fringe of wood. She was beautiful with a rare loveliness at all times, yet I found myself wondering whether, on the strange frontiers of love, it was her daring duplicity that appealed to me. I set myself stubbornly into a pillory reared of my own shame at the thought, and went out and climbed upon the Glenarm wall and stared at the dark bulk of St. Agatha's as I punished myself for having entertained any other thought of Helen Holbrook than of a weak, vain, ungrateful girl, capable of making sad mischief for her benefactor.

Ijima passed and repassed in the paved walk that curved among the school buildings; I heard his step, and marked his pauses as he met the gardener at the front door by an arrangement that I had suggested. As I considered the matter I concluded that Helen Holbrook could readily slip out at the back of the house, when the guards thus met, and that she had thus found egress on the night before.

At this moment the two guards met precisely at the front door, and to my surprise Sister Margaret, in the brown garb of her Sisterhood, stepped out, nodded to the watchmen in the light of the overhanging lamp, and walked slowly round the buildings and toward the lake. The men promptly resumed their patrol. The Sister slipped away like a shadow through the garden; and I dropped down from the wall inside the school park and stole after her. The guards were guilty of no impropriety in passing her; there was, to be sure, no reason why Sister Margaret should not do precisely as she liked at St. Agatha's. However, my curiosity was piqued, and I crept quietly along through the young maples that fringed the wall. She followed a path that led down to the pier, and I hung back to watch, still believing that Sister Margaret had gone forth merely to enjoy the peace and beauty of the night. I paused in a little thicket, and heard her light step on the pier flooring; and I drew as near as I dared, in the shadow of the boat-house.

She stood beside the upright staff from which the pier lights swung—the white lantern between the two red ones—looking out across the lake. The lights outlined her tall figure distinctly. She peered about anxiously several times, and I heard the impatient tap of her foot on the planks. In the lake sounded the faint gurgle of water round a paddle, and in a moment a canoe glided to the pier and a man stepped out. He bent down to seize the painter, and I half turned away, ashamed of the sheer curiosity that had drawn me after the Sister. Nuns who chafe at their prison-bars are not new, either to romance or history; and this surely was no affair of mine. Then the man stood up, and I saw that it was Gillespie. He was hatless, and his arms were bared. He began to speak, but she quieted him with a word; and as with a gesture she flung back her brown hood, I saw that it was Helen Holbrook.