“If I don’t get out of this I’ll kill her!” she thought, clasping and unclasping her strong young hands. “And I know she doesn’t mean me ever to get out. She means to make me a nun, and it’s no use my telling Father Parker I’ve no vocation, for he’s deaf, and never hears what I say. She can take her time and yell at him. If I shout in the confessional I only get punished. The other nuns would stand up for me--some of them. But, though this might keep me from being made a novice, they couldn’t keep me from being made a lay sister; for it’s in the charter that charity girls must pay the convent back for their keep, somehow. And she’ll never let me go out into the world to do it. I--I’d be willing to starve if I could only get away!” She got up and went to the window, heedless of bumps against the empty forms. But outside there was nothing to see but a November garden, cold and barren, and a homeless cat, crossing it furtively. The girl watched the miserable creature with the painful sympathy she felt for all animals. In the dusk she saw it leap nimbly to the top of the high wall and disappear. The convent rebel did not even know what was on the other side of that wall; but she knew too well what was on this side. A lay sister’s life, spent in the kitchens; in scrubbing and killing fowls. She shuddered. And Mother Felicitas’ eye was always on her; always with the same threat, the same malice. She peered into the twilight. The stray cat was gone. Beryl Corselas stretched her young body, stiff with long sitting, just as the cat itself might have done before it started on its furtive journey. But when a sad-eyed nun came and let her out of the locked class-room her face was as sullenly vacant as usual. There was no one, not even Mother Felicitas, full of self-conceit at her realized ambition, to know that the girl’s pulses were playing a wild tune that night, and that the childhood that had sat so strangely on her had fallen from her like a garment. Unnoticed, Beryl slipped up to bed before the other charity pupil; and undressed in their joint alcove. Pale and too slender in her white cotton nightgown, she passed under the white sheet that separated her cubicle from the next. It belonged to a rich West Indian girl, and in a box on the table were sovereigns, as she had known there would be. Without a pang of hesitation Beryl Corselas took two in the glimmer of the floating night-light. Then she lifted the sheet and slipped under it, back to her own alcove, just in time. As she put the coins noiselessly into her bed, the stout girl who shared the alcove came in. She whispered sharply, though talking was forbidden: “You’re to be moved to-morrow; sent to the kitchen with Sister Agnes. I wish I was you; you’ll get enough to eat. Sister Agnes is just sweet.”