This teaching proved very irksome to her, for it delayed the completion of her book, and she often meditated an escape, thinking how this might be accomplished while the nuns played at ball in the autumn afternoon.  Very often they were all in the garden, all except Sister Agnes, the portress, and she often left her keys on the nail.  So it would be easy for Evelyn to run down the covered way and take the keys from the nail and open the door.  And the day came when she could not resist the temptation of opening the door, not with a view to escape; but just to know what the sensation of the open door was like.  And she stood for some time looking into the landscape, remembering vaguely, somewhere at the back of her mind, that she could not take the Prioress’s papers with her, they did not belong to her; the convent could institute an action for theft against her, the Prioress not having made any formal will, only a memorandum saying she would like Evelyn to collect her papers.

So it was necessary for her to lock the gate again, to restore the keys to the nail, and return to the library.  But in a few weeks more her task would be done, and it would be pleasanter to go away when it was done; and, as it has already been said, Evelyn liked landmarks.  “To pass out is easy, but the Evelyn that goes out will not be the same as the Evelyn who came in.”  And a terror gathered in her mind, remembering that she was forty, and to begin life again after forty, and after such an experience as hers, might prove beyond her strength.  Doubts enter into every mind, doubt entered into hers; perhaps the convent was the natural end of her life, not as a nun, but as an oblate.  The guest-room was a pleasant room, and she could live more cheaply in the convent than elsewhere.  There are cowardly hours in every life, and there were hours when this compromise appealed to Evelyn Innes.  But if she remained she would have to continue teaching under Mother Winifred’s direction.  A little revolt awoke in her.  She could not do that; and she began to think what would happen to her when she left the convent.  There would not be money enough left her to sit down in a small flat and do nothing; she would have to work.  Well, she would have to do that in any case, for idleness was not natural to her, and she would have to work for somebody besides herself—­for her poor people—­and this she could do by giving singing lessons.  Where?  In Dulwich?  But to go back to the house in which she lived her life, to the room which used to be hung with the old instruments, and to revive her mother’s singing classes?  No, she could not begin her life from exactly the same point at which she left off.  And gradually the project formed in her mind of a new life, a life which would be at once new and old.  And the project seemed to take shape as she wrote the last pages of her memoir of the late Prioress.

“It is done, and I have got a right to my own manuscript; they cannot take that from me.”  And she went into the sacristy, her manuscript in her hand.