So I said, “Why don’t you go out and talk to him over the garden wall? We’ll let you down with a sheet, which will be rather a rag.” As a matter of fact that’s just what it was; because the beastly sheet busted, and there was poor Cora dancing about by the light of the moon in a nightgown and a mackintosh. Sister Margaret, who has apocalyptic visions every night, thought Cora—oh, I’m sick of calling her by a false name, and anyway if some stuffy old nun does open this and read it, well, I hope she’ll enjoy it. I do hate espionage. Don’t you? We’ve only had it here since Sister Rose succeeded to the throne. Well, Sister Margaret was looking out of her window just as the sheet busted and dropped Enid Wilson—that’s the girl—down into the garden. She at once thought it was a miracle, and rushed to Sister Monica who sleeps in the next room and banged on her door and said. “Oh, sister! Our Lady has just descended into the garden.” Tableau vivant! There’s a picture for you! Of course Joan and I were simply in fits. Anyway there’s the most terrific row on that the school has ever had. Enid is convinced that she’s going to be expelled. Investigations by the authorities have discovered all about her darling Gerald. Apparently one of the gardeners found a note and gave it to Sister Rose. Joan Hutchinson and I are in pretty well to the hilt for letting Enid out of the window, and so at any moment you may receive a curt note from Reverend Mother to say that I am incorrigible and please accept delivery. Heaps of love, Your sinister child Letizia. That’s what Sister Rose thinks I am. She said to me, “I cannot help thinking, Letizia, that you have played a very sinister part in this sorry affair.” Nancy immediately wrote a stern letter to Letizia, reproaching her for not appreciating what the nuns had done for her, and by the same post she wrote to Mother Catherine, pleading for a lenient view of what she assured her was really more a thoughtless prank than a serious and premeditated piece of naughtiness. Perhaps Mother Catherine decided that Sister Rose’s methods tended to make her pupils rebel against them by outrageous behaviour. At any rate, Sister Rose went to take charge of the house at Eastbourne and rule the indigent maiden ladies provided for therein. Sister Perpetua came down from Beaumanoir to be head-mistress; and there were no more letters from Letizia about rows, for Sister Perpetua, like Mother Catherine, was never strict for the sake of strictness, but wise and holy and human. That year Nancy was acting in the North, so she spent Christmas at Beaumanoir with Mother Catherine. Snow was lying thick on the moors when she arrived. It reminded her of that Christmas eleven years ago when Mother Mary Ethelreda was still alive.