She was known on the boat only as “the little convent girl.”  Her name, of course, was registered in the clerk’s office, but on a steamboat no one thinks of consulting the clerk’s ledger.  It is always the little widow, the fat madam, the tall colonel, the parson, etc.  The captain, who pronounced by the letter, always called her the little convent girl.  She was the beau-ideal of the little convent girl.  She never raised her eyes except when spoken to.  Of course she never spoke first, even to the chambermaid, and when she did speak it was in the wee, shy, furtive voice one might imagine a just-budding violet to have; and she walked with such soft, easy, carefully calculated steps that one naturally felt the penalties that must have secured them—­penalties dictated by a black code of deportment.

[Illustration:  THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY.]

She was dressed in deep mourning.  Her black straw hat was trimmed with stiff new crape, and her stiff new bombazine dress had crape collar and cuffs.  She wore her hair in two long plaits fastened around her head tight and fast.  Her hair had a strong inclination to curl, but that had been taken out of it as austerely as the noise out of her footfalls.  Her hair was as black as her dress; her eyes, when one saw them, seemed blacker than either, on account of the bluishness of the white surrounding the pupil.  Her eyelashes were almost as thick as the black veil which the sisters had fastened around her hat with an extra pin the very last thing before leaving.  She had a round little face, and a tiny pointed chin; her mouth was slightly protuberant from the teeth, over which she tried to keep her lips well shut, the effort giving them a pathetic little forced expression.  Her complexion was sallow, a pale sallow, the complexion of a brunette bleached in darkened rooms.  The only color about her was a blue taffeta ribbon from which a large silver medal of the Virgin hung over the place where a breast pin should have been.  She was so little, so little, although she was eighteen, as the sisters told the captain; otherwise they would not have permitted her to travel all the way to New Orleans alone.

Unless the captain or the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress.  Never leaning back—­oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call.  She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain, and particularly of the clerk.  Every one knows the fund of humor possessed by a steamboat clerk, and what a field for display the table at meal-times affords.  On Friday she fasted rigidly, and she never began to eat, or finished, without a little Latin movement of the lips and a sign of the cross.  And always at six o’clock of the evening she remembered the angelus, although there was no church bell to remind her of it.