d Joan, "for I know you
cannot. Now I must go and pack my saddle-bags and mails." [Trunks.]

She went thence with her light foot, and my Lady looked somewhat sadly
after her.

"I love thee, do I, child?" saith she in another tone. "Ah, if I do,
thou owest it less to anything in thee than to the name they wed thee
in. Help us, Mother of Mercy! Time was when I thought I, too, should
one day have been a Greystoke. Well, well! God be merciful to us poor
dreamers, and poor sinners too!"

Then, with slower step than she is wont, she went after Joan.

My child is gone, and I feel like a bereaved mother. I shall see her
again, if it please God, but what a blank she has left! She says when
next Lent comes, if God will, she will visit us, and maybe bring with
her her little Laurentia, that she named after my lost love, because she
had eyes like his. God bless her, my child Joan!

Sister Roberga set forth for Shuldham the same day, in company with
Father Benedict, who desired to travel that road, and in charge of two
of the brethren and of Sister Willa. I trust she may some day see her
errors, and amend her ways: but I cannot felicitate the community at
Shuldham on receiving her.

So now we shall slip back into our old ways, so far as can be under a
Prioress who assuredly will let none of us suffer the moss to grow upon
her, body or soul, so far as she can hinder it. I hear her voice now
beneath, in the lower corridor, crying to Sister Sigred, who is in the
kitchen to-day--

"Did ever man or woman see the like? Burning seacoal on the
kitchen-fire! Dost thou mean to poison us all with that ill smoke?
[Note 6.] And wood in the wood-house more than we shall use in half a
year! Forty logs came in from the King only yesterday, and ten from my
Lord of Lisle the week gone. Sister Sigred, when shall I put any sense
in you?"

"I don't know, Madam, I'm sure!" was poor Sister Sigred's rather
hopeless answer.

I have found out at last what the world is. I am so glad! I asked
Father Mortimer, and I told him how puzzled I was about it.

"My daughter," said he, "thou didst renounce three things at thy
baptism--the world, the flesh, and the Devil. The works of the flesh
thou wilt find enumerated in Saint Paul's Epistle to the Galatians
[Galatians 5, verses 19-21]: and they are _not_ `love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.'
These are the fruits of the Spirit. What the