The robin sang an evening song from the bough, of the pieman's tree.
The Prioress returned along the passage, looking into every cell.

Each door stood open wide; each cell was empty.

The sick nuns were on a further passage, round the corner, beyond the Refectory stairs.

Yet she passed along this also, making sure that the door of each occupied cell was shut.
Standing motionless at the top of the Refectory steps, she could hear the distant clatter of platters, the shuffling feet of the lay-sisters as they carried the dishes to and from the kitchens; and, above it all, the monotonous voice of Sister Mary Rebecca reading aloud to the nuns while they supped.
Then the Prioress took down one of the crypt lanterns and lighted it.
* * * * * * Meanwhile the Knight, left alone, stood for a few moments, as if stunned.
He had played for a big stake and lost; yet he felt more unnerved by the unexpected finality of his own acquiescence in defeat, than by the firm refusal which had brought that defeat about.
It seemed to him, as he now stood alone, that suddenly he had realised the extraordinary detachment wrought by years of cloistered life.
Aflame with love and longing he had come, seeking the Living among the Dead.

It would have been less bitter to have knelt beside her tomb, knowing the heart forever still had, to the last, beat true with love for him; knowing the dead arms, lying cold and stiff, had he come sooner, would have been flung around him; knowing the lips, now silent in death, living, would have called to him in tenderest greeting.
But this cold travesty of the radiant woman he had left, said: "Touch me not," and bade him seek a wife elsewhere; he, who had remained faithful to her, even when he had thought her faithless.
And yet, cold though she was, in her saintly aloofness, she was still the woman he loved.