Elinora Injures Cleo's Eyes and Throws Her from the Window

Elinora’s attack on Cleo transforms a dispute at the school into a deliberate act of violence against an animal and exposes Lizzy’s inability to protect the kitten in the moment. After Cleo is thrown from a window, Lizzy finds her injured in an old pipe and learns from Sister Roberta that both of the kitten’s eyes have been pierced by a sharp object.

The attack and its immediate aftermath

The incident begins when Elinora leans toward Lucy and the beads in Lucy’s lap spill across the floor. Cleo leaps from Lizzy’s lap and chases them, scattering them as she races about. Rosalyn reacts to the kitten’s presence as a violation of the school’s rule against keeping one there: she lifts Cleo by the back of the neck and holds her suspended. Lizzy rises and reaches for the kitten, but the struggle shifts when Elinora refuses to let Cleo go.

With the frightened kitten in her arms, Elinora turns toward the window. Lizzy sees her doing something and then hears Cleo howl. The other girls hold Lizzy back as Elinora opens the window and throws the kitten onto the street. The act is not merely a threat or an attempt to remove an animal from the room: Cleo’s distressed meowing from outside confirms that she has been cast out injured, while Lizzy has been physically prevented from intervening.

Lizzy runs through the hall and out the front door to search. She finds Cleo only after twenty minutes, dirty, cold, and frightened, curled inside an old pipe in the ground. Blood is running from the kitten’s eyes. Lizzy picks her up, tries to clean her eyes, cuddles her, and apologizes before carrying her inside to find Sister Roberta. The search gives the episode a second ordeal: after witnessing the attack, Lizzy must locate Cleo without knowing how badly she has been hurt.

Sister Roberta examines Cleo in the infirmary, cleans her, and gives her something to quiet her. Her examination identifies a specific injury: a sharp object has pierced both eyes. She returns the shivering kitten to Lizzy, who holds Cleo against her neck and identifies Elinora’s embroidery needle as the likely weapon. Sister Roberta considers whether the kitten should be put to sleep, describing that possibility as a painless release from suffering. The scene therefore moves from the girls’ confrontation to the practical question of Cleo’s survival, with Lizzy’s care for the injured animal set against the severity of what has been done to her.

Denial, confession, and the unexplained recovery

The attack’s meaning is obscured for a time by Elinora’s denial. When Lizzy accuses her, Elinora insists that something must have happened to Cleo’s eyes in the street and points to what she says she saw the kitten do: chase the curtains in a room the previous night. Lizzy questions how Cleo could have followed them if she were blind, but Elinora maintains that the cat can see. Her account offers an apparent contradiction to Sister Roberta’s diagnosis without explaining how the injury changed or whether Cleo’s sight returned.

The truth emerges much later, as Lizzy leaves with the wagons. In the bustle of the goodbyes, Elinora admits that she did prick Cleo’s eyes that day. She then qualifies the admission by suggesting that, if Cleo is not blind, the carpenter must have held her. Her confession confirms that the injury was deliberate, while leaving its lasting effects—and the carpenter’s part in Cleo’s apparent ability to see—unresolved.

By then, people at the school and convent have spent four months believing that the carpenter was Saint Joseph, and Lizzy has scoffed at the claim. The reported link between his holding Cleo and her not being blind falls into the story’s larger tension between physical evidence and belief: Cleo’s recovery is presented alongside the staircase that has become a local marvel, but Elinora’s remark does not establish how either supposed miracle occurred.

The episode’s moral and narrative force

Cleo’s injury makes the conflict between Lizzy and Elinora legible through a vulnerable third party. Lizzy names the act as taking anger out on an innocent creature; Elinora’s later admission confirms that the kitten was not simply caught in the girls’ quarrel but deliberately harmed. The school’s ban on keeping a kitten explains why Cleo’s presence provokes protest, but it does not account for the leap from enforcing that rule to violence. The episode draws a sharp boundary between the stated grievance and the cruelty committed in its name.

The sequence also distinguishes what Lizzy can witness from what she can establish. She sees Elinora with Cleo at the window, hears the kitten howl, and finds her bleeding; Sister Roberta’s examination identifies injuries to both eyes. Much later, Elinora acknowledges pricking them, yet her suggestion that the carpenter held Cleo leaves the kitten’s apparent ability to see unexplained. That gap places the episode beside the convent’s belief in the carpenter’s miraculous identity without making Cleo’s recovery proof of it. Elinora’s confession settles the question of deliberate harm; it does not settle how the injury’s apparent consequences changed.

Elinora’s defense and her uncle’s standard

In a later confrontation, Elinora denies harming Cleo and says she had never done such a thing, although she had suffered a switching. She invokes her uncle’s anger at anyone he suspects of mistreating God’s creatures, describing a standard that makes the attack especially stark: the conduct she later admits is precisely the kind of cruelty she says he will not tolerate. Her reference does not explain the circumstances of the switching, but it shows that the accusation touches a moral boundary already present in the family’s world, not only a private dispute between the girls.