The trial of Rita's obedience was this: The Prioress, who had observed her great spirit of submission, commanded her to water every day a dried-up tree that was in the convent garden. Rita made no objection against so strange a command; she did not say that such an order was outside the matters to which the Rule obliged her; she did not even submit that it would be time lost, for she was convinced that the time in which any work of obedience is done is time well spent. Therefore, with her will in complete accord with the orders she received, she continued to obey them for several seasons, and in this she was imitating the example of the holy abbot John, of whom we read in the lives of the Fathers that, in order to follow the instructions of his director, he humbled himself so far as to carry a pail of water a considerable distance to water a dry trunk of a tree. So did St. Rita likewise, and not in vain; for so pleasing to God were her acts of heroic obedience that, as tradition tells, the tree bloomed again, and began to bear flowers and fruit, and from that fact it was called the 'Saint's Tree.' What chiefly concerned her was that her obedience should bear fruit unto eternal life, and hence the love which her heart felt for this beautiful virtue was ever increasing. She therefore sought the approval, direction, and restraining influence of another's will not only in her temporal undertakings, but also in her devotional and penitential exercises. When there was question of going to Rome to gain the indulgences of the jubilee year, and again when she was to be separated during the last years of her life from the pleasant society of her sisters in religion, she allowed no consideration of fervent piety, no personal reluctance, to come between her and her duty towards holy obedience, from which she would not swerve an iota. Thus our saint passed the rest of her life without a will of her own, or, if she had a will, it was one that desired to do nothing except what obedience ordered, in this way making certain of doing the will of God in all things, which was the single object of all her desires. This is how she conquered in herself and annihilated that great predominant passion of man, the love of worldly glory.