To be
checked or hurried, would leave Mary Antony with the sense of an
incomplete confession.
Therefore, with infinite patience the Prioress listened, seated in the
sunlit garden, undisturbed, save for the silent passing, once or twice,
of a veiled figure through the cloisters, who, seeing the Reverend
Mother seated beneath the beech, did reverence and hastened on, looking
not again.
When the garrulous old voice at last fell silent, the Prioress, with
kind hand, covered the restless fingers--clasping and unclasping in
anxious contortions--and firmly held them in folded stillness.
Her first words were of a thing as yet unmentioned.
"Dear Antony," she said, "is that thy posy lying at our feet?"
"Ah, Reverend Mother," sighed the old lay-sister, "in this did I again
do wrong meaning to do right. Sister Mary Augustine, coming into the
kitchens with leave, from Mother Sub-Prioress, to make the pasties, and
desiring to be free to make them heavy--unhampered by my advice which,
of a surety, would have helped them to lightness--bade me go out and
weed the garden.
"Weeding, I bethought me how much liefer I would be gathering a posy of
choicest flowers for our sweet Lady's shrine; and, thus thinking, I
began to do, not according to Sister Mary Augustine's hard task, but
according to mine own heart's promptings. Yet, when the posy was
finished, alack-a-day! it was a posy of weeds!"
Tears filled the eyes of the Prioress; at first she could not trust her
voice to make reply.
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