“Ha, thou little vain man, in thy brown and red suit!” chuckled Mary Antony, leaning her gnarled hands on the stone parapet, as she stood framed in one of the cloister arches overlooking the garden.  “Is that thy little ‘grace before meat’?  But, I pray thee, Sir Robin, who said there was cheese in my wallet?  Nay, is there like to be cheese in a wallet already containing five-and-twenty holy Ladies on their way back from Vespers?  Out upon thee for a most irreverent little glutton!  I fear me thou hast not only a high look, thou hast also a proud stomach; just the reverse of the great French Cardinal who came, with much pomp, to visit us at Easter time.  He had a proud look and a—­ Come down again, thou little naughty man, and I will tell thee what the Lord Cardinal had under his crimson sash.  ’Tis not a thing to shout to the tree-tops.  I might have to recite ten Paternosters, if I let thee tempt me so to do.  For whispering it in thine ear, I should but say one; for having remarked it, none at all.  Facts are facts; and, even in the case of so weighty a fact, the responsibility rests not upon the beholder.”

Mary Antony leaned over the parapet, looking upward.  The afternoon sunlight fell full upon the russet parchment of her kind old face, shewing the web of wrinkles spun by ninety years of the gently turning wheel of time.

But the robin, perched upon the bough, trilled and sang, unmoved.  He was weary of tales of bakers and piemen.  He was not at all curious as to what had been beneath the French Cardinal’s crimson sash.  He wanted the tasty morsels which he knew lay concealed in Sister Mary Antony’s leathern wallet.  So he stayed on the bough and sang.

The old face, peering up from between the pillars, softened into tenderness at the robin’s song.

“I cannot let thy little grace return unto thee void,” she said, and fumbled at the fastenings of her wallet.

A flick of wings, a flash of red.  The robin had dropped from the bough, and perched beside her.

She doled out crumbs, and fragments of cheese, pushing them toward him along the parapet; leaving her fingers near, to see how close he would adventure to her hand.

She watched him peck a morsel of cheese into five tiny pieces, then fly, with full beak, on eager wing, to the hidden nest, from which five gaping mouths shrieked a shrill and hungry welcome.  Then, back again—­swift as an arrow from the archer’s bow—­noting, with bright eye, and head turned sidewise, that the hand resting on the coping had moved nearer; yet brave to take all risks for the sake of those yellow beaks, which would gape wide, in expectation, at sound of the beat of his wings.