“With your history background, you’ll be a wonderful asset,” Erma had insisted.

Mary Helen had been impressed. After all these years, how had Erma remembered her major? She couldn’t recall if she had even declared one yet, in that long-ago summer session.

“And, of course, we want Sister Eileen too. With her vast knowledge of reference materials.” So, it wasn’t memory at all! She had pumped Eileen.

“If that’s all right with you, Sister?” Erma’s voice brought Mary Helen back to the present.

Mrs. Taylor-Smith, pewter eyes unflinching, looked at her expectantly.

“Oh, yes,” Mary Helen answered. If good old Erma said something was all right, she’d bet even money that it was.

Everyone smiled pleasantly-everyone, that is, except Eileen, who looked puzzled. Mary Helen would ask her what she had agreed to as soon as they were alone in the hotel room.

Meanwhile, she watched while Erma introduced the other OWLs to Mrs. Taylor-Smith.

Beside her, Caroline Coughlin removed a glove and extended her hand. The feather on the wide-brimmed hat covering her champagne-colored hair quivered ever so slightly as she inclined her head. Caroline’s deep blue eyes smiled, but she curved her lips just barely, so that not a wrinkle creased her subtly made-up face. In Mary Helen’s opinion, this woman was the closest the OWLs would ever come to meeting a royal princess or, at Caroline’s age, a queen dowager.

Rumor had it, though, that when provoked, the genteel Mrs. Coughlin, who had outlived two husbands, could sing a song of swearwords guaranteed to make a stevedore blanch. Whenever she had accidentally let one slip in front of the nuns, Mary Helen noted, she had the uncanny knack of making it sound like the height of refinement. Yes, indeed, she thought, observing her charm Mrs. Taylor-Smith, Caroline Coughlin was, as they say, “to the manner born.”