"Good sister, I do not understand. Just now I was with Monsieur Van Zandt. He was wounded. Oh, how pale he was!" shivering. "Another minute, and I am here. How is it, and where is he?"
The old priest had entered noiselessly, and the low voice was distinctly audible to his ears. He shuddered.
He had just read in a paper of the mysterious disappearance of Eliot Van Zandt, who was supposed to have been murdered, and his body flung into the lake or the river. Hence the girl's strange words struck coldly on his senses. He thought:
"Her soul has been parted from the body in that strange trance, and has taken cognizance of the man vainly sought for by friends and detectives. What if she could tell where he is hidden!"
Muttering a prayer for the girl, he came up to the bedside.
"Bless you, my daughter," he said, soothingly. "And so you have seen Eliot Van Zandt? Does he yet live?"
She looked at him gently and with surprise. Perhaps, in the strange experiences of her trance, she was inured to surprises.
"Holy father," she murmured, reverentially, then, gently. "I have seen him. He is not dead. He is not going to die. But he is very ill; he is dangerously wounded."
The little nun chirped an "oh!" of vivacious wonder, but the priest silenced her by a warning glance.