“Please let me help you to pick up your pictures.”  Miss Dingle did not answer, and Evelyn feared for a moment that she had offended her.  “Won’t you let me help you to pick up your pictures?”

“Yes,” she said, “you may help me to pick them up, but you must be very quick.”

“But why must I be quick?  Are you in such a very great hurry?”

Miss Dingle seemed uncertain of her own thoughts, and to reassure her, Evelyn asked her if she would not like to walk with her in the orchard.

“Oh,” she said, looking at Evelyn shyly—­it was a sort of child-like curiosity, “I dare not go into the orchard to-day....  I brought these pictures to keep him from me.  I know that he is about.”

“Who is about?”

“I’m afraid he might hurt me.”

“But who would hurt you?”

“Well,” she said cautiously, “perhaps he’d be afraid to come near me to-day,” and she glanced at her frock.  “But I’m sure he’s about.  Did you see any one as you came through the furze bushes?”

“No,” Evelyn answered; and trying to conceal her astonishment, she said, “I’m sure there’s no one there.”

“Ah, he knows it would be useless.”  She glanced again at her frock.  “You see my blue skirt, that has perhaps frightened him away.”

“But who has gone away?”

“Oh, the devil is always about.”

“But you don’t think he would hurt you?”

Miss Dingle looked suspiciously at Evelyn, and some dim thought whether Evelyn was the devil in disguise must have crossed her mind.  But whatever the thought was, it was but a flitting thought; it passed in a moment, and Miss Dingle said—­“But the devil is always trying to hurt us.  That is what he comes for.”

“So that is why you surrounded yourself with pious pictures—­to keep him away?”

Miss Dingle nodded.

“What a nice dress you have on.  I suppose you like blue.  I always notice you wear it.”

“I wear blue, as much blue as I can, for blue is the colour of the Virgin Mary, and he dare not attack me while I have it on.  But I wear sometimes only a handkerchief, sometimes only a skirt, but now that he is about so frequently, I have to dress entirely in blue.”

Evelyn asked her if she had lived in the convent long, and Miss Dingle told her she had lived there for the last three or four years, but she would give no precise answer when Evelyn asked if she hoped to become a nun, or whether she liked her home or the convent the better.

“Now,” she said, “I must really go and say some prayers in the church.”

Evelyn offered to accompany her, but she said she was well armed, and showed Evelyn several rosaries, which in case of need she would wave in his face.

Sister Mary John was digging in the kitchen garden, and Evelyn told her how she had come upon Miss Dingle in the summer-house surrounded by pious pictures.  Leaning on her spade, Sister Mary John looked across the beds thinking, and Evelyn wondered of what.  She said at last that Miss Dingle thought too much of the devil.