The guests of Hercules

								

been like, in those first days, for the novice's habit had changed her
so strangely, seeming to chill her warm humanity, turning a lovely,
glowing young girl into a beautiful marble saint. But under the marble,
warm blood had been flowing, and a hot, rebellious heart throbbing,
after all. Peter delighted in knowing that this was true, though she was
anxious about the statue coming to life and walking out of its sheltered
niche. When she was called to say goodbye formally, with other friends
who had loved Mary as schoolgirl and novice, Peter's own heart was
beating fast.
The instant she caught sight of the tall, slight, youthful-looking
figure in gray, the three years fell away like a crumbling wall, and
gave back the days of the "three Maries." No, the silvery blond hair had
not faded or lost its sparkle.
Mary Grant, in her short gray skirt and coat, with her lovely hair in an
awkwardly done clump at the nape of a slender neck, looked a mere
schoolgirl. She was twenty-four, and nearing her twenty-fifth birthday.
Of late, she had had anxieties and vigils, and the life of a novice of
Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake was not lived on down or roses: but the
tranquil years of simple food, of water-drinking, of garden-work, of
quiet thinking and praying had passed over her like the years in
dreams, which last no longer than moments. They had left her a child,
with a child's soft curves and a child's rose-leaf skin. Yet she looked
to Peter very human now, and no saint. Her large eyes, of that golden
gray rimmed with violet, called hazel, seemed to be asking, "What is
life?"
Peter thought her intensely pathetic; and somehow the fact that new
shoes had been forgotten, and that Mary still wore the stubby,
square-toed abominations of her novitiate, made her piteous in her
friend's eyes. The American girl hotly repented not writing to her
father in New York and telling him that she must leave the convent with
Mary Grant. Probably he would not have consented, but she might have
found some way of persuading him to change his mind. Or she could have
gone without his consent, and made him forgive her afterward. Even now
she might go; but dimly and sadly she felt that Mary did not really wish
for her superior knowledge of the world to lean upon; Mary longed to
find out things for herself.
Peter did not sleep well that night, and when she did sleep she dreamed
a startling dream of Mary at Monte Carlo.
"She'll go there!" the girl said to herself, waking. "I know she'll go.
I don't know why I know it, but I do."
Trying to doze again, she lay with closed eyes; and a procession of
strange, unwished-for thoughts busily pushed sleep away from her brain.
She seemed to see people hurrying from many different parts of the
world, with their minds all bent on the same thing: getting to Monte
Carlo as soon as possible. She saw these people, good and bad, mingling
their lives with Mary's life; and she saw the Fates, like Macbeth's