"More liberty, quotha!" cried Isel in amazement. "Whatever can the child mean? More liberty, penned up in two little chambers, and never to leave them all your life, than in a fine large place like Godstowe, with a big garden and cloisters to walk in?" "Ah, Mother, I don't want liberty for my feet, but for my soul. There will be no abbess nor sisters to tease one in the anchorhold." "Well, and what does that mean, but never a bit of company? Just your one maid, and tied up to her. And the child calls it `liberty'!" "You forget, Mother," said Haimet mischievously. "There will be the Lady Derette. In the cloister they are only plain Sister." Every recluse had by courtesy the title of a baron. "As if I cared for that rubbish!" said Derette with sublime scorn. "Dear! I thought you were going on purpose," retorted her brother. "Whom will you have for your maid, Derette?" asked her sister. "Ermine, if I might have her," answered Derette with a smile. Gerhardt suddenly stopped the reply which Ermine was about to make. "No," he said, "leave it alone to-night, dear. Lay it before the Lord, and ask of Him whether that is the road He hath prepared for thee to walk in. It might be for the best, Ermine." There was a rather sorrowful intonation in his voice. "I will wait till the morning, and do as you desire," was Ermine's reply. "But I could give the answer to-night, for I know what it will be. The best way, and the prepared way, is that which leads the straightest Home." It was very evident, when the morning arrived, that Gerhardt would much have liked Ermine to accept the lowly but safe and sheltered position of companion to Derette in the anchorhold. While the hermit lived alone, but wandered about at will, the anchorite, who was never allowed to leave his cell, always had with him a companion of his own sex, through whom he communicated with the outer world. Visitors of the same sex, or children, could enter the cell freely, or the anchorite might speak through his window to any person. Derette, therefore, would really be less cut off from the society of her friends in the anchorhold, than she would have been as a cloistered sister at Godstowe, where they would only have been permitted to see her, at most, once in a year. But outside the threshold of her cell she might never step, save for imminent peril of life, as in the case of fire. She must live there, and die there, her sole occupation found in devotional exercises, her sole pleasure in her friends' visits, the few sights she could see from her window, and through a tiny slit into the chancel of the Church of Saint John the Baptist, which we know as the chapel of Merton College. Every anchorhold was built close to a church, so as to allow its occupant the privilege of seeing the performance of mass, and of receiving the consecrated wafer, by the protrusion of his tongue through the narrow slit.