“I had a child’s thought--that Margery was the most beautiful creature in the wide world--most beautiful and best. And because she was young and fair and gracious in speech even our hard sisters loved her, and thought it pity of the world when her fair tresses were shorn and she took the ugly veil. For Margery was not religious. God pardon me for my sinful words, but I think she was meant for better things than religion and a cloister. And though she was good and kind to all, Margery did not take to our sisters. There was some trouble--I know not what, for she never told--and for some family reason she was sent to St Radegund’s, and ill she liked it. So she went about her work in cloister and church, grieving; and there was talk of her among the sisters. Some thought, some said, that they knew, but Margery said nothing. “It is all forgotten now, for the pestilence wiped out the memory of those days. Scarcely twelve months had gone since she took the veil when Margery Cailly disappeared from the Priory. You may think what babble of tongues there was in our parlour--how they who were wisest had always known how it would be, and the rest rebuked them for not telling them beforehand. And so for another twelvemonth she was lost to us, and some sisters, who were kind, hoped that she would come back, and some who were kinder, hoped she would not. “Then, one day in the year before the pestilence, comes an apparitor with our lost Margery, and a letter to the Prioress from the Lord Bishop of Ely. The letter is to say that the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his visitation of Lincoln diocese, has found Margery there, living a secular life; and because secular life is sin to those who have entered the religious order, he commits her to his brother of Ely, in order that the lost sheep may be restored to the fold where she was professed. And his Lordship of Ely--Heaven help him for a blundering bachelor!--directs that she shall be committed to the convent prison-house until she repents of her wickedness, and when she is loosed from it, shall make public confession in Chapter, and implore the pardon of the sisters for her enormities.