After that night, Daria would always slip into the Abbess’ hut before she took her own place in the church, and, if the child seemed restless, she would wrap her up warmly in her own mantle and carry her with her. So Darlugdacha early took her part in the “Magnum Opus,” and the earliest words her tongue uttered were the praises of God. The music of the psaltery was her most frequent lullaby. She was welcome everywhere, and in no place whithersoever her little pattering feet led her, did she find her help, however embarrassing to the recipient, disdained. Even when there were guests in the guest-house, and Blathnata, the cook, was very busy in the kitchen, Darlugdacha could enter that domain fearlessly, and, as Blathnata soon found out, could make herself astonishingly useful. The kitchen was a little round hut, which stood by itself behind the other cells. A fire of wood burned in the middle of it, the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. It was always a joy to Darlugdacha when Blathnata swung the beautiful shining cauldron over the flames, and the cheerful simmering of the meat within filled the little hut with sound. She was very proud of herself when she was, at last, permitted to go near enough to the fire to turn the fish, or joints, that were roasting on spits of pointed hazel rods round the fire, and proudest of all, when Blathnata showed her how to baste them with honey. She was very young, indeed, when she cooked her first dish of Craibhacan, chopping the meat fine, and flavouring it with leeks, and kale, and rowan berries. Nathfraich, the charioteer, won her heart by making for her a tiny kneading trough, and a sieve with a whale-bone bottom, and he secured it for ever by manfully eating to the last crumb the first cake she baked with these utensils. Kinnia said, as she and Blathnata were carrying water one day from the covered well in the dairy to the kitchen, and Darlugdacha was trotting along by their side (her hand on one of the handles of the pail, as if she had the whole weight of it herself), that, for her part, she would rather eat a woman’s ration than a man’s ration of Darlugdacha’s baking. But when she saw Darlugdacha, presently, with one of Blathnata’s cooking-aprons on her (so as to save her white tunic), scrubbing away very busily at Blathnata’s wooden vessels, the little woman looked so sweet, that Kinnia told herself she would eat a whole cake, if it were necessary, to please her.