The library was a long, rather narrow room, once the drawing-room of the Georgian mansion.  Only a carved Adams’ chimney-piece, now painted over in imitation of oak remained of its former adornment; the tall windows were eighteenth century, and with that air they looked upon the terrace.  The walls had been lined by the nuns with plain wooden shelves, and upon them were what seemed to be a thousand books, every one in a grey linen wrapper, with the title neatly written on a white label pasted on the back.  Evelyn’s first thought was of the time it must have taken to cover them, but she remembered that in a convent time is of no consequence.  If a thing can be done better in three hours than in one, there is no reason why three hours should not be spent upon it.  She had noticed, too, that the sisters regarded the library with a little air of demure pride.  Mother Mary Hilda had told her that the large tin boxes were filled with the convent archives.  There were piles of unbound magazines—­the Month and the Dublin Review.  There was a ponderous writing-table, with many pigeon-holes; Evelyn concluded it to be the gift of a wealthy convert, and she turned the immense globe which showed the stars and planets, and wondered how the nuns had become possessed of such a thing, and how they could have imagined that it could ever be of any use to them.  She grew fond of this room, and divided her time between it and the garden.  It had none of the primness of the convent parlour, which gave her a little shiver every time she entered it.  In the further window there stood a deep-seated, venerable arm-chair, covered in worn green leather, the one comfortable chair, Evelyn often thought, in the convent.  And in this chair she spent many hours, either learning to construe the Office with Mother Mary Hilda, or reading by herself.  The investigation of the shelves was an occupation, and the time went quickly, taking down book after book, and she seemed to penetrate further into the spirit of the convent through the medium of the convent books.

The light literature of the convent were improving little tales of conversion, and edifying stories of Catholic girls who decline to enter into mixed marriages, and she thought of the novices reading this artless literature on Sunday afternoons.  There were endless volumes of meditations, mostly translations from the French, full of Gallicisms and parenthetical phrases, and Evelyn often began a paragraph a second time; but in spite of her efforts to control her thoughts they wandered, and her eyes, lost in reverie, were fixed on the sunny garden.