"She wasn't my nurse," Miss Penny explained. "But I used to see her quite often when she came in to have a look at the _tolle Engländerin_. Her name was Sister Agatha. During the war, they told me, she had converted any number of wounded soldiers to the true faith--which wasn't surprising, considering how pretty she was." "Did she try and convert you?" I asked. "She wasn't such a fool." Miss Penny laughed, and rattled the miniature gallows of her ears. I amused myself for a moment with the thought of Miss Penny's conversion--Miss Penny confronting a vast assembly of Fathers of the Church, rattling her earrings at their discourses on the Trinity, laughing her appalling laugh at the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, meeting the stern look of the Grand Inquisitor with a flash of her bright, emotionless hare's eyes. What was the secret of the woman's formidableness? But I was missing the story. What had happened? Ah yes, the gist of it was that Sister Agatha had appeared one morning, after two or three days absence, dressed, not as a nun, but in the overalls of a hospital charwoman, with a handkerchief instead of a winged coif on her shaven head. "Dead," said Miss Penny; "she looked as though she were dead. A walking corpse, that's what she was. It was a shocking sight. I shouldn't have thought it possible for anyone to change so much in so short a time. She walked painfully, as though she had been ill for months, and she had great burnt rings round her eyes and deep lines in her face. And the general expression of unhappiness--that was something quite appalling." She leaned out into the gangway between the two rows of tables, and caught the passing waiter by the end of one his coat-tails. The little Italian looked round with an expression of surprise that deepened into terror on his face. "Half a pint of Guinness," ordered Miss Penny. "And, after this, bring me some jam roll." "No jam roll to-day, madam." "Damn!" said Miss Penny. "Bring me what you like, then." She let go of the waiter's tail and resumed her narrative. "Where was I? Yes, I remember. She came into my room, I was telling you, with a bucket of water and a brush, dressed like a charwoman. Naturally I was rather surprised. 'What on earth are you doing, Sister Agatha?' I asked. No answer. She just shook her head, and began to scrub the floor. When she'd finished, she left the room without so much as looking at me again. 'What's happened to Sister Agatha?' I asked my nurse when she next came in. 'Can't say.'--'Won't say,' I said. No answer. It took nearly a week to find out what really had happened. Nobody dared tell me; it was _strengst verboten_, as they used to say in the good old days. But I wormed it out in the long run. My nurse, the doctor, the charwomen--I got something out of all of them. I always get what I want in the end." Miss Penny laughed like a horse. "I'm sure you do," I said politely.