The chapter room of St. Margaret's Convent was a chill, bare chamber containing an oak table and four or five plain oak chairs. On the painted walls, which were of dun gray, there was an etching by a Florentine master of the flight into Egypt, and a symbolic print of the Sacred Heart. Besides these pictures there was but a single text to relieve the blindness of the empty walls, and it ran: "Where the tree falls, there it must lie."
Four days after Greta's departure from the house wherein she had been received as a temporary boarder, the superior sat in the chapter room, and a sister knelt at her feet. The sister's habit was gray and her linen cape was plain. She wore no scapular, and no hood above the close cap that hid her hair and crossed her forehead. She was, therefore, a lay sister; she was Sister Grace.
"Mother, hear my sin," she said in a trembling whisper.
"Speak on, daughter."
"We were both at Athlone in the year of the great famine. He was an officer in a regiment quartered there. I was a novice of the choir in the Order of Charity. We met in scenes sanctified by religion. Oh, mother, the famine was sore, and he was kind to the famished people! 'The hunger is on us,' they would cry, as if it had been a plague of locusts. It was thus, with their shrill voices and wan faces, that the ragged multitudes followed us. Yes, mother, he was very, very kind to the people."
"Well?"
The penitent bowed her head yet lower. "My mother, I renounced the vows, and—we were married."
The lips of the superior moved in silent prayer.
"What was his name, my daughter?"
"Robert Lowther. We came from Ireland to London. A child was born, and we called him Paul. Then my husband's love grew chill and died. I grieved over him. Perhaps I was but a moody companion. At last he told me—"