"If you wish it," she said in English--and he appeared to comprehend.

"He wants to know whether I would like to take a turn at the cylinder." She knelt down in front of it, before the little stool where the brother in yellow had been kneeling till that moment, and took the string in her hand, as if she were well accustomed to it.

I could see that the abbot gave the cylinder a surreptitious push with his left hand, before she began, so as to make it revolve in the opposite direction from that in which the monk had just been moving it.

This was obviously to try her.
But Hilda let the string drop, with a little cry of horror.

That was the wrong way round--the unlucky, uncanonical direction; the evil way, widdershins, the opposite of sunwise.