"It's a shame!" said Dick, passionately; adding, "If you cared for me as I do for you, you wouldn't talk so coolly of its being an end." Whereat there was nothing to do but to rise and return to the house. I don't know why I have written this down, only it is a part of my life. There can be no harm in it, because Richard and I can never be anything to each other—not even brother and sister—because a good religious knows no ties of natural affection. No doubt the coombe is full this very day of violets and primroses, and all other sweet flowers, and the spring is welling up and running over its basin all among the moss and fern, and the brook liverwort; and I dare say the very same chaffinch is singing there this minute. There are violets in our convent garden as well, but they are planted in a straight bed, and Mother Gabrielle uses the flowers to make her sirups, and the leaves are gathered for our sallets. There is a spring, too, but not one bit like that in the coombe. That boils up out of a deep and wide cleft in the rock, filling its basin full and running over the stones in twenty little vagrant streams. Great ferns grow over and shade it, and leaves drop into it in the autumn, and birds and wild-wood creatures come to drink of its waters. This pours in a steady orderly stream from a pipe which sticks straight out from the wall, and runs down a straight course, paved and edged with cut stone, into the stew-pond where we keep our fish. Still our convent garden is a sweet and pretty place, full of orderly knots and beds of flowers and herbs, chiefly such as are good to distil cordials, or to help out our messes on fast days—rue, and mints, and hyssops, and angelica, and caraway, and burnet—with abundance of roses, and poppies, and white lilies, and a long bed of sweet flowers for the bees. We have a fine stock of beehives. Then we have plum and pear and apple trees, and a bed of strawberries. At the end of the garden are two most ancient elm trees, and under them a very small, and very, very old chapel of our Lady of Sorrows. Dear Mother says it is by far the oldest part of the convent. It is very small, as I said, built of huge stones, with low heavy arches. Over the altar stands the image of our Lady, rudely carved in some dark wood. It is a very holy image, and used to work miracles in old times. I wish it would again. I should dearly love to see a miracle. At the back of this chapel, and joining it, so as to be under the same roof, is another building, very low and massive, with no windows, but one very narrow slit, close under the eaves. A heavy iron-studded door opens into it from the chapel itself. Mother Gertrude told me one day that it contained the staircase leading to a burial vault under the chapel, now never used, and that it had not been opened for years and years.