Looking up, the Prioress met the bright eye of the robin, peeping down.

Why, surely?  Yes!  There was the “Bloody Vest.”

The Prioress smiled.  She began to understand.

The robin burst into a stream of triumphant song.  At which, old Mary
Antony, still kneeling, shook her uplifted fist.

The Prioress raised and drew her to the seat.

“Now sit thee here beside me,” she said, “and make full confession.  Ease thine old heart by telling me the entire tale.  Then I will pass sentence on the robin if, true to his name, he turns out to be a thief.”

So there, in the Convent garden, while the robin sang overhead, the Prioress listened to the quaint recital; the dread of making mistake in the daily counting; the elaborate plan of dropping peas; the manner in which the peas became identified with the personalities of the White Ladies; the games in the cell; the taming of the robin; the habit of sharing with the little bird, interests which might not be shared with others, which had resulted that morning in the display of the peas, and this undreamed of disaster—­the abduction of the Reverend Mother.

The Prioress listened with outward gravity, striving to conceal all signs of the inward mirth which seized and shook her.  But more than once she had to turn her face from the peering eyes of Mary Antony, striving anxiously to gather whether her chronicle of sins was placing her outside the pale of possible forgiveness.

The Prioress did not hasten the recital.  She knew the importance, to the mind with which she dealt, of even the most trivial detail.  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!”