Finding themselves away from their families in this deserted lane, the girls took to their heels, and left like sheep a perceptible little cloud of dust smoking in the gloom behind them.

Beyond the last house and alongside the Okaw river stood the ruined building with gaping entrances.  The girls stumbled among irregular hummocks which in earlier days had been garden beds and had supplied vegetables to the brethren.  The last commandant of Kaskaskia, who occupied the Jesuits’ house as a fortress, had complained to his superiors of a leaky and broken roof.  There was now no roof to complain of, and the upper floors had given way in places, leaving the stone shell open to the sky.  It had once been an imposing structure, costing the Jesuits forty thousand piasters.  The uneven stone floor was also broken, showing gaps into vaults beneath; fearful spots to be avoided, which the custom of darkness soon revealed to all eyes.  Partitions yet standing held stained and ghastly smears of rotted plaster.

The river’s gurgle and rush could be distinctly heard here, while the company around the bonfire were lost in distance.

Angelique had given her arm to Maria Jones in the flight down the road; but when they entered the college Maria slipped away from her.  A blacker spot in an angle of the walls and a smothered cough hinted to the care-taker where the invalid girl might be found, but where she also wished to be let alone.

Now a sob rising to a scream, as if the old building had found voice and protested against invasion, caused a recoil of the invaders.  Girls brought up in neighborly relations with the wilderness, however, could be only a moment terrified by the screech-owl.  But at no previous time in its history, not even when it was captured as a fort, had the Jesuit College inclosed such a cluster of wildly beating hearts.  Had light been turned on the group, it would have shown every girl shaking her hand at every other girl and hissing, “S—­s—­sh!”

“Girls, be still.”

“Girls, do be still.”

“Girls, if you won’t be still, somebody will come.”

“Clarice Vigo, why don’t you stop your noise?”

“Why do you not stop yours, mademoiselle?”

“I haven’t spoken a word but sh!  I have been trying my best to quiet them all.”

“So have I.”

“Ellen Bond fell over me.  She was scared to death by a screech-owl!”

“It was you fell over me, Miss Betsey.”

“If we are going to try the charm,” announced Peggy Morrison, “we must begin.  You had better all get in a line behind me and do just as I do.  You can’t see me very well, but you can scatter the hempseed and say what I say.  And it must be done soberly, or Satan may come mowing at our heels.”

From a distant perch to which he had removed himself, the screech-owl again remonstrated.  Silence settled like the slow fluttering downward of feathers on every throbbing figure.  The stir of a slipper on the pavement, or the catching of a breath, became the only tokens of human presence in the old college.  These postulants of fortune in their half-visible state once more bore some resemblance to the young ladies who had stood in decorum answering compliments between the figures of the dance the night before.