of eyes bright with excitement, proud of her gray, immaculately dressed father and the quiet, effective calm with which he directed porters and other menials about and inserted order amid the chaos of departing passengers at the dock as far as their own voluminous luggage was concerned, boarded the steamer at Buenos Aires for the first great adventure of her thus far rather uneventful life. There was some regret in her heart at leaving the trim, broad acres of the de Cordoba estate, ten miles away in distance and a century away in everything else from this bustling metropolitan confusion. But she had never been very happy at home, and, though she was under no delusion regarding the hilarious life one leads at a convent, knowing something about Spanish ones, still the future was alluring.
The convent which Carmelita's father and Lucy Hodge had selected for his daughter was located some thirty miles from New York in a region of trimly kept wealthy estates of Wall Street millionaires and lesser moneyed and golfing gentry. The modern buildings of fieldstone in a setting of green lawns and symmetrically planted shrubbery, were located a mile from the nearest road and isolated by a high, ivied wall as effectively as if they were in the midst of a wilderness. There was here
