“Bring her to the little parlour.”
Mrs. Mulholland creaked into the chapel, mopping at her eyes resolutely with a large handkerchief, and sank heavily on to her knees beside the bench where Rosamund was half kneeling and half crouching.
“Mother Juliana wants you in the little parlour, my dear. Will you come?”
Rosamund came. Her hands moved with a helpless, groping gesture, and her face, stained and ravaged, was blank of expression.
“My dear, God’s Holy Will be done, is what I say,” said the old woman beside her, moving along the stone passage with a step that seemed more ponderous than usual.
“You’ve been making your act of resignation too, haven’t you, poor child—I know it. Come in to Mother Juliana.”
Mrs. Mulholland was crying openly, but Mother Juliana faced Rosamund with the fixed, remote gaze of one whose standard of values is set elsewhere.
“God is going to ask a gift from you,” she said quietly to Rosamund.
Rosamund looked at her with the dilated eyes of a child that cannot understand what is said to it.
“There is only one solution,” she muttered in an inward voice.