On a certain afternoon in this mid-spring of 1381, the very day, indeed, that Lord Gerault took to the Rennes road to ease his ennui, a little company of nuns sat out in the convent garden, embroidering away their recreation time. The day was exquisite: sunny, a little chilly, its breeze laden with the rare perfume of awakening summer. The garden, at this season of the year, was a place of wondrous beauty, redolent of rich, pregnant soil, and all shimmering with the misty green of tender grass and countless leaf-buds, from the midst of which a few flowers, pale primroses and crocuses and a hyacinth or two, peered forth, starring the new-planted beds with the first fruits of this new union of earth and sky. The spirit of the spring ruled supreme over all natural things. Only the creatures of God, the self-consecrated nuns, sat in the midst of this wonder of the young world, untouched by it. Heedless to the uttermost of this greatest of worldly blessings, they sat plying their needles in and out of their bright-colored, ecclesiastical fabrics, listening, in their dull and dreamy way, to the voice of one of their number who was droning out to them for the thousandth time the old and long-familiar laws of their order, expressed in the “Rhymed Rule of St. Benedict.” One only among them seemed not of their mood. This was a young girl, white-robed like all the rest, her unveiled head proclaiming her novitiate. As became her station she bent decorously to her task, and it had taken a close observer to see and read all the little signs she gave of consciousness of the world around her, the green, growing things, and the liquid bird-songs that came trilling out of the forest near at hand. Probably not even the most skilled of readers could have recognized all the meaning in the long, slow looks, half wondrous and half probing, with which, every now and again, she traversed the circle of faces about her. Her self-restraint was very nearly flawless, and was successfully maintained throughout the long period of recreation; so that not one of her companions guessed the relief she felt when the first clang of the vesper-bell roused them from their trance-like dulness. But the young girl wondered a little at herself when she perceived that her brows were damp with the sweat of the constraint.