learnt it, took his
cap and went out to look for Mr. Morris. He went first to the little
dark outhouse, and peered in over the bottom half of the door, but there
was no sign of him there. He could see a horse standing in a stall
opposite, and tried to make out the second horse that he knew was there;
but it was too dark, and he turned away.

It was a warm October afternoon as he went out through the gatehouse,
still and bright, with the mellow smell of dying leaves in the air; the
fields stretched away beyond the road into the blue distance as he went
along, and were backed by the thinning woods, still ruddy with the last
flames of autumn. Overhead the blue sky, washed with recent rains,
arched itself in a great transparent vault, and a stream of birds
crossed it from east to west.

He went round the corner of the convent buildings and turned up into a
meadow beside a thick privet hedge that divided it from the garden, and
as he moved along he heard a low humming noise sounding from the other
side.

There was a door in the hedge at the point, and at either side the
growth was a little thin, and he could look through without being
himself seen.

The grass was trim and smooth inside; there was a mass of autumn
flowers, grown no doubt for the altar, running in a broad bed across the
nearer side of the garden, and beyond it rose a grey dial, round which
sat a circle of nuns.

Ralph pressed his face to the hedge and watched.

There they were, each with her wheel before her, spinning in silence.
The Abbess sat in the centre, immediately below the dial, with a book in
her hand, and was turning the pages.

He could see a nun's face steadily bent on her wheel--that was Dame
Agnes who had fetched the cope for him in the morning. She seemed
perfectly quiet and unaffected, watching her thread, and putting out a
deft hand now and again to the machinery. Beside her sat another, whose
face he remembered well; she had stammered a little as she gave her
answers in the morning, and even as he looked the face twitched
suddenly, and broke into tears. He saw the Abbess turn from her book and
lay her hand, with a kind of tender decision on the nun's arm, and saw
her lips move, but the hum and rattle of the spinning-wheels was too
loud to let him hear what she said; he saw now the other nun lift her
face again from her hands, and wink away her tears as she laid hold of
the thread once more.

* * * * *