She did not understand in the least.  Such discipline as he suggested, whatever might be her faults and frailty, was, she declared with vigour, entirely unsuited to the case of the Lady Cicely, who, in her opinion, had suffered much for a small cause, and who, moreover, was about to become a mother, and therefore should be treated with every gentleness.  For her part, she washed her hands of the whole business, and rather than enforce such commands would lay the case before the Vicar-General in London, who, she understood, was ready to look into such matters.  Or at least she would set the Lady Harflete and her servant outside the gates and call upon the charitable to assist them.  Of course, however, if his Lordship chose to send a skilled woman to wait upon her in her trouble, she could have no objection, provided that this woman were a person of good repute.  But in the circumstances it was idle to talk to her of bread and water and dark cells and scourgings.  Such things should never happen while she was Prioress.  Before they did, she and her sisters would walk out of the Nunnery and leave the King’s Courts to judge of the matter.

Now the state of the Abbot was very like to that of a terrier dog which, being accustomed to worry and torment a certain ewe-sheep, comes upon the same after it has lambed and finds a new creature—­one that, instead of running in affright, turns upon it and, with head and hood and all its weight of mutton, butts, and leaps, and tramples.  Then what chance has that dog against the terrible and unsuspected fury of the sheep, born, as it thought, for it to tear?  Then what can it do but run, panting and discomfited, to its kennel?  So it was with the Abbot at the onslaught of Mother Matilda in the defence of her lamb—­Cicely.  With Emlyn he had been prepared to exchange bite for bite—­but Mother Matilda! his own pet quarry.  It was too much.  He could only go away, cursing all women and their infinite variety, on which no man might build.  Who would have thought it of Mother Matilda, of all people on the earth!

So it came to pass that at the Nunnery, notwithstanding these terrible threats, things went on much as they had done before, since the times were such that even an all-powerful and remote Lord Abbot, with “right of gallows,” could not drive matters to an extremity.  Cicely was not shut into the dungeon and fed on bread and water, much less was she scourged.  Nor was she separated from her nurse Emlyn, although it is true that the Prioress reproved her for her resistance to established authority, and when she had finished her lecture, kissed and blessed her, and called her “her sweet child, her dove and joy.”

But if there was sameness at the Nunnery, at the Abbey there was constant change and excitement.  Only three days after the fire the great flock of eight hundred lambs rushed one night over the Red Cliff on the fell, where, as all shepherds in that country know, there is a sheer drop of forty feet.  Never was lamb’s flesh so cheap in Blossholme and the country round as on the morrow of that night, while every hind within ten miles could have a winter coat for the skinning.  Moreover, it was said and sworn to by the shepherds that the devil himself, with horns and hoofs, and mounted on a jackass, had been seen driving the same lambs.