A shadow swept over her face.

"Do you think I was?" she queried meditatively--"I cannot imagine
it! I suppose I must have been, but I never remember being a child
at all. I had no children to play with me--my father suspected all
children of either disease or wickedness, and imagined I would catch
infection of body or of soul by association with them. I was always
alone--alone!--yet not lonely!" She broke off a moment, and her eyes
grew dark with the intensity of her thought "No--never lonely! And
the very earliest 'interval' of happiness I can recall was when I
first saw the inside of a sun-ray!"

Don Aloysius turned to look at her, but said nothing. She laughed.

"Dear Father Aloysius, what a wise priest you are! Not a word falls
from those beautifully set lips of yours! If you were a fool--(so
many men are!) you would have repeated my phrase, 'the inside of a
sun-ray,' with an accent of scornful incredulity, and you would have
stared at me with all a fool's contempt! But you are not a fool,--
you know or you perceive instinctively exactly what I mean. The
inside of a sun-ray!--it was disclosed to me suddenly--a veritable
miracle! I have seen it many times since, but not with all the
wonder and ecstasy of the first revelation. I was so young, too! I
told a renowned professor at one of the American colleges just what
I saw, and he was so amazed and confounded at my description of rays
that had taken the best scientists years to discover, that he begged
to be allowed to examine my eyes! He thought there must be something
unusual about them. In fact there IS!--and after his examination he
seemed more puzzled than ever. He said something about 'an