'You don't know, Lady Castlerich, that my Agnes wanted to become a nun, to enter a convent where they get up at four o'clock in the morning to say matins.' 'Oh, how very dreadful,' said Lady Castlerich, 'Agnes must come to my shootin' party.' 'Father White--the priest you saw here just now--brought her home. Fortunately he took our side, and he told Agnes she must see the world; it would be time enough a year hence to think if she had a vocation.' 'Mother dear, he said six months.' 'What, are you tired of us already, Agnes?' 'No, mother, but--' Agnes hung down her head. 'Agnes must come to my shootin' party, we must find a young man for her, there is Mr. Moulton, or would you like Mr. St. Clare better? I hope, Mr. Moulton, you'll be able to come to Morelands on the twenty- fifth.' Mr. Moulton said that nothing would give him more pleasure, and feeling that Lady Castlerich intended that his charms should for ever obliterate Agnes' conventual aspiration he leaned towards her and asked her if she knew Yorkshire. Morelands was in Yorkshire. His conversation was, however, interrupted by Lady Castlerich, who said in her clear cracked voice: 'We must put Agnes in the haunted room amid the tapestries.' 'No, no, don't frighten her,' whispered the Major. 'But, father, I am not so easily frightened as that.' 'Who haunts the tapestry-room?' 'A nun, dear, so they say; Morelands was a monastery once--a nunnery, I mean. The monastery was opposite.' 'That was convenient,' giggled Mr. Moulton. 'And why does the nun haunt the tapestries?' 'Ah, my dear, that I can't tell you.' 'Perhaps the nun was a naughty nun,' suggested Mr. Moulton. 'Are there no naughty nuns in your convent?' 'Oh, no, not in my convent, all the sisters are very good, you cannot imagine how good they are,' said Agnes, and she looked out of eyes so pale and so innocent that he almost felt ashamed. 'But what a strange idea that was of yours, Agnes,' said Miss Dare across the table, 'to want to shut yourself up for ever among a lot of women, with nothing else to do but to say prayers.' 'You think like that because you do not know convent life. There is, I assure you, plenty to do, plenty to think about.' 'Fancy, they hardly ever speak, only at certain hours,' said Mrs. Lahens. 'It is the getting up at four o'clock in the morning that seems to me the worst part,' said Miss Dare. 'The monotony,' said St. Clare, 'must be terrible; always the same faces, never seeing anything new, knowing that you will never see anything else.' Agnes listened to these objections eagerly. 'The nuns are not sad at all,' she said. 'If you saw them playing at ball in the garden you would see that they were quite as happy as those who live in the world. I don't know if you are sad in the world; I don't know the world, but I can assure you that there is no sadness in the convent.'