Between two and three years had passed since her coming, and the child was now a grown-up girl, nearly nineteen years old.

Of her means little or nothing was known accurately, even to the priest.

She had told him that she had saved enough out of the wreck on which to live with her girl after some very humble fashion, and she paid her way.

There must have come some sudden crash, or she would hardly have taken her child from an expensive Parisian school to vegetate in such solitude as that she had chosen.

And it was a solitude from which there seemed to be no chance of future escape.