And so was it done. Sister Cecilia lay in the Abbess’s room for fourteen days; she had a high fever, and Lady Groa herself tended her. When she got up again, she had to sit for a week at the side of the Abbess in the high seat both in the church and in the convent, and all waited on her—she wept all the time as though she were being beaten with whips. But afterward she was much calmer and happier. She lived much as before, but she blushed like a bride if anyone looked at her, whether she was sweeping the floor or going alone to the church. * * * * * None the less did this matter of Sister Cecilia awake in Kristin a great longing for peace and atonement with all wherefrom she had come to feel herself cast out. She thought of Brother Edwin, and one day she took courage and begged leave of Lady Groa to go out to the barefoot friars and visit a friend she knew there. She marked that Lady Groa misliked this—there was scant friendship between the Minorites and the other cloisters in the bishopric. And the Abbess was no better pleased when she heard who was Kristin’s friend. She said this Brother Edwin was an unstable man of God—he was ever wandering about the country and seeking leave to pay begging visits to strange bishoprics. The common folk in many places held him to be a holy man, but he did not seem to understand that a Franciscan’s first duty was obedience to those set over him. He had shriven freebooters and outlaws, baptised their children, chanted them to their graves without asking leave—yet, doubtless, he had sinned as much through ignorance as in despite, and he had borne meekly the penances laid upon him on account of these things. He was borne with too because he was skilled in his handicraft—but even in working at this, he had fallen out with his craft-fellows; the master-limners of the Bishop of Bergen would not suffer him to come and work in the bishopric there.