feet. By-and-by we came to a pretty opening in the wood, where some
charitable soul had erected a rude rustic seat that was more than half
covered with the initials of idle wayfarers. Here Sister Agnes sat down
to rest. She had brought a volume of poems with her, and while she read
I wandered about, never going very far away, feasting on the purple
blackberries, finding here and there a late-ripened cluster of nuts,
trying to find out a nest or two among the thinned foliage, and enjoying
myself in a quiet way much to my heart's content.

I don't think Sister Agnes read much that morning. Her gaze was oftener
away from her book than on it. After a time she came and joined me in
gathering nuts and blackberries. She seemed brighter and happier than I
had hitherto seen her, entering into all my little projects with as much
eagerness as though she were herself a child. How soon I had learned to
love her! Why had I lived all those dreary years at Park Hill without
knowing her? But I could never again feel quite so lonely--never quite
such an outcast from that common household love which all the girls I
had known seemed to accept as a matter of course. Even if I should
unhappily be separated from Sister Agnes, I could not cease to love her;
and although I had seen her for the first time barely forty-eight hours
ago, my child's instinct told me that she possessed that steadfastness,
sweet and strong, which allows no name that has once been written on its
heart to be erased therefrom for ever.

My thoughts were running in some such groove, but they were all as
tangled and confused as the luxuriant undergrowth around me. It must
have been out of this confusion that the impulse arose which caused me
to address a question to Sister Agnes that startled her as much as if a
shell had exploded at her feet.