“You have come to the conclusion that perhaps a good deal of time is wasted in this garden, which might be devoted to good works?”

“Yes, that has struck us, and we think the best way out of our difficulties would be a school.”

“A school!”

“Something must be done,” she said, “and we are thinking of starting a school.  We’ve received a great deal of encouragement.  I believe I could get twenty pupils to-morrow, but Mother Prioress won’t hear of it.  She tells us that we are to pray, and that all will come right.  But even she does not depend entirely upon prayer; she depends upon Sister Teresa’s singing.”

“A most uncertain source of income, I should say.”

“So we all think.”

They walked in silence until within a few yards of the end of the walk; and, just as they were about to turn, the priest said: 

“I was talking at the Bishop’s to a priest who has been put in charge of a parish in one of the poorest parts of South London.  There is no school, and the people are disheartened; and he has gone to live among them, in a wretched house, in one of the worst slums of the district.  He lives in one of the upper rooms, and has turned the ground floor, which used to be a greengrocer’s shop, into a temporary chapel and school, and now he is looking for some nuns to help him in the work.  He asked me if I could recommend any, and I thought of you all here, Sister Winifred, with your beautiful church and garden, doing, what I call, elegant piety.  It has come to seem to me unbearably sad that you and I and these few here, who could do such good work, should be kept back from doing it.”

“I am afraid our habit, Father, makes that sort of work out of the question for us.”  And Sister Winifred dropped her habit for a moment and let it trail gracefully.

“Long, grey habits, that a speck of dirt will stain, are very suitable to trail over green swards, but not fit to bring into the houses of the poor, for fear they should be spoiled.  “Oh,” he cried, “I have no patience with such rules, such petty observances.  I have often asked myself why the Bishop chose to put me here, where I am entirely out of sympathy, where I am useless, where there is nothing for me to do really, except to try to keep my temper.  I have spoken of this matter to no one before, but, since you have come to speak to me, Sister Winifred, I, too, must speak.  Ever since I’ve been here I’ve been longing for some congenial work—­work which I could feel I was intended to do.  It seems hard at times to feel one’s life slipping away and the work one could do always withheld from one’s reach.  You understand?”

“Indeed, I do.  It is the fate of many of us here, Father Daly.”

“Now, if you could make a new foundation—­if some three or four of you—­if the Bishop would send me there.”

“Of course, we might go and do good work in the district you speak of, but I doubt whether the Bishop would recognise us as a new foundation.”