“But, my dear child,” exclaimed Uncle Bertrand, staring at her aghast.

He managed to recover himself very quickly, and was, in his way, very kind to her; but the first thing he did was to send to Paris for a fashionable maid and fashionable mourning.

“Because, as you will see,” he remarked to Alice, “we cannot travel as we are.  It is a costume for a convent or the stage.”

Before she took off her little conventual robe, Elizabeth went to the village to visit all her poor.  The cure went with her and shed tears himself when the people wept and kissed her little hand.  When the child returned, she went into the chapel and remained there for a long time.

She felt as if she was living in a dream when all the old life was left behind and she found herself in the big luxurious house in the gay New York street.  Nothing that could be done for her comfort had been left undone.  She had several beautiful rooms, a wonderful governess, different masters to teach her, her own retinue of servants as, indeed, has been already said.

But, secretly, she felt bewildered and almost terrified, everything was so new, so strange, so noisy, and so brilliant.  The dress she wore made her feel unlike herself; the books they gave her were full of pictures and stories of worldly things of which she knew nothing.  Her carriage was brought to the door and she went out with her governess, driving round and round the park with scores of other people who looked at her curiously, she did not know why.  The truth was that her refined little face was very beautiful indeed, and her soft dark eyes still wore the dreamy spiritual look which made her unlike the rest of the world.

“She looks like a little princess,” she heard her uncle say one day.  “She will be some day a beautiful, an enchanting woman—­her mother was so when she died at twenty, but she had been brought up differently.  This one is a little devotee.  I am afraid of her.  Her governess tells me she rises in the night to pray.”  He said it with light laughter to some of his gay friends by whom he had wished the child to be seen.  He did not know that his gayety filled her with fear and pain.  She had been taught to believe gayety worldly and sinful, and his whole life was filled with it.  He had brilliant parties—­he did not go to church—­he had no pensioners—­he seemed to think of nothing but pleasure.  Poor little Saint Elizabeth prayed for his soul many an hour when he was asleep after a grand dinner or supper party.

He could not possibly have dreamed that there was no one of whom she stood in such dread; her timidity increased tenfold in his presence.  When he sent for her and she went into the library to find him luxurious in his arm chair, a novel on his knee, a cigar in his white hand, a tolerant, half cynical smile on his handsome mouth, she could scarcely answer his questions, and could never find courage to tell what she so earnestly desired.  She had found out