PTER

At half past six in the morning I was awakened by the loud ringing of
the getting-up bell, and as soon as I could rouse myself from the deep
sleep of childhood I saw that a middle-aged nun with a severe face was
saying a prayer, and that all the girls in the dormitory were kneeling
in their beds while they made the responses.

A few minutes later, when the girls were chattering and laughing as they
dressed, making the room tingle with twittering sounds like a tree full
of linnets in the spring, a big girl came up to me and said:

"I am Mildred Bankes and Sister Angela says I am to look after you
to-day."

She was about fifteen years of age, and had a long plain-featured face
which reminded me of one of my father's horses that was badly used by
the farm boys; but there was something sweet in her smile that made me
like her instantly.

She helped me to dress in my brown velvet frock, but said that one of
her first duties would be to take me to the lay sisters who made the
black habits which all the girls in the convent wore.

It was still so early that the darkness of the room was just broken by
pale shafts of light from the windows, but I could see that the children
of my own age were only seven or eight altogether, while the majority of
the girls were several years older, and Mildred explained this by
telling me that the children of the Infant Jesus, like myself, were so
few that they had been put into the dormitory of the children of the
Sacred Heart.

In a quarter of an hour everybody was washed and dressed, and then, at a
word from Sister Angela, the girls went leaping and laughing downstairs
to the Meeting Room, which was a large hail, with a platform at the
farther end of it and another picture of the Sacred Heart, pierced with
sharp thorns, on the wall.

The Reverend Mother was there with the other nuns of the Convent, all
pale-faced and slow eyed women wearing rosaries, and she said a long
prayer, to which the scholars (there were seventy or eighty altogether)
made responses, and then there was silence for five minutes, which were
supposed to be devoted to meditation, although I could not help seeing
that some of the big girls were whispering to each other while their
heads were down.

After that, and Mass in the Church, we went scurrying away to the
Refectory, which was now warm with the steam from our breakfast and
bubbling with cheerful voices, making a noise that was like water
boiling in