Then the stern displeasure on that loved face silenced her. She
dropped upon her knees, ashen and trembling.

Now the Prioress held personal fear in high scorn; and if, after ninety
years' experience of lightning and thunder, Mary Antony was not better
proof against their terrors, the Prioress felt scant patience with her.
She spoke sternly.

"How now, Mary Antony! Why this unseemly haste? Why this rush into my
presence; no knock; no pause until I bid thee enter? Is the
storm-fiend at thy heels? Now shame upon thee!"

For only answer, Mary Antony opened her clenched hand: whereupon twenty
peas fell pattering to the floor, chasing one another across the
Reverend Mother's cell.

The Prioress frowned, growing suddenly weary of these games with peas.

"Have the Ladies returned?" she asked.

Mary Antony grovelled nearer, let fall the key, and seized the robe of
the Prioress with both hands, not to carry it to her lips, but to cling
to it as if for protection.

With the clang of the key on the flags, a twisted blade of fire rent
the sky.

As the roar which followed rolled away, echoed and re-echoed by distant
hills, the old lay-sister lifted her face.