"It will make no difference," she answered.
"I feel that my end is very near. Doubtless what I did last night may have hastened my death, but I do not regret it; I would do it again."
"What you did last night!" I repeated, struck with a sudden, most strange thought. "Do you mean, Amice, that you—" I could not finish the sentence.
"Hush!" said she. "Even so, Rosamond. I took the keys from under Mother Gertrude's pillow (you know how sound she sleeps, especially when she has been disturbed), opened the doors and let the prisoner free."
"But the outer door—that heavy iron door!" I exclaimed, in amazement.
"I did not open the outer door. She climbed over the wall there by the beehives. The gardener had left his ladder close by. I wonder they did not find it in the search this morning."
"I dare say he had taken it away before that he might not be blamed for his carelessness," said I. "But Amice, even then I see not how you accomplished it. We have thought you so weak."
"And so I have been," said she. "The day before, I could hardly rise without help, and after I got back to my bed, I lay for many hours so utterly exhausted that I many times thought myself dying. But at least I had the strength to call nobody, for I wished above all things that Magdalen might have time to escape. She told me at parting that with three hours' vantage, she would defy even the King's bloodhounds to find her; and I was determined she should lose that vantage through no fault of mine."
"But, if you had died, Amice—died without confession and the sacraments," said I. I knew that she had not confessed for a long time, putting off the Father by saying she was too weak, and that it hurt her to talk.
"I should not have died without confession, dearest Rosamond," said she, with an heavenly smile. "I have known this many a day that there needs no priest to make a confession valid, but that to every truly penitent heart the way to the very throne of Heaven is open, and that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin. If I regretted aught, it was that I must die without another kind of confession—the confessing my faith openly before men. I have longed to do so, but I shame to say it—I have been afraid. But now I fear no longer."