The road lay through fields and past farmhouses, but the suburban street was never quite lost sight of.  Its blue roofs and cheap porticos appeared unexpectedly at the end of an otherwise romantic prospect, and so on and so on, until the driver let his horse walk up Wimbledon hill.  When they reached the top she craned her neck, and was in time to catch a glimpse of the windmill far away to the right.  The inn was in front of her, the end of a long point of houses stretching into the common, and the hansom rolled easily on the wide, curving roads.  She anticipated the choked gardens, the decaying pear trees, the gold crowns of sunflowers; and a moment after the hansom passed these things and she saw the old green door, and heard the jangling peal.  The eyes of the lay sister looked through the barred loop-hole.

“How do you do, sister?  I suppose you expected me?”

The cabman put the trunk inside the long passage, and Evelyn said—­

“But my luggage.”

“If you’ll come into the parlour I’ll get one of the sisters to help me to carry it upstairs.”

Evelyn was sitting at the table turning over the leaves of the Confessions of St. Augustine, when the Reverend Mother entered.  She seemed to Evelyn even smaller than she had done on the first occasion they had met; she seemed lost in the voluminous grey habit, and the long, light veil floated in the wind of her quick step.

“I’m glad you were able to come so soon.  All the sisters are anxious to meet you, you who have done so much for us.”

“I’ve done very little, Reverend Mother.  Could I have done less for my old convent?  I hope that your difficulties are at an end.”

“At an end, no, but you helped us over a critical moment in the fortunes of our convent.”

Her hands were leaned against the edge of the table, her white fingers, white with age, played with the hem of her veil, her blue, anxious eyes were fixed on Evelyn at once tenderly, expectantly, and compassionately.  Her voice was the clear, refined voice which signifies society, and Evelyn would not have been surprised to learn that she belonged to an old aristocratic family, Evelyn imagined her to be a woman in whom the genius of government dominated, and who, not having found an outlet into the world, had turned to the cloister.  Was that her story?  Evelyn wondered, and suddenly seemed to forsee a day when she would hear the story which shone behind those clear blue eyes, and obliterated age from the white face.

They went up the circular staircase, at the top of which was a large landing; there were two rooms at the head of the stairs, and the Reverend Mother said—­

“These are our guest chambers.”  Standing on a second landing, one step higher than the first, a solid wooden partition had been erected, and pointing to a door the nun said with a laugh, “That door leads to the sisters’ cells.  You must not make a mistake.”