She would count the passing feet.
The young lay-sister who carried the light, stumped up the steps, and set down the lantern with a clatter.

She plumped on to her knees opposite to Mary Antony.
"Sister Mary Rebecca leads to-day," she chanted in a low voice, "and all the way hath stepped upon my heels." But Mary Antony took no notice of this information, which, at any other time, would have delighted her.
Head bowed, eyes on the ground, she awaited the passing feet.
They came, moving slow and sedate.
They passed--stepping two by two, out of her range of vision; moving along the cloister, dying away in the distance.
All had passed.
Nay! Not all?
Another comes! Surely, another comes?
Sister Abigail, lifting the lantern, rose up noisily.
"What wait you for, Sister Antony?
The holy Ladies have by now entered their cells." Mary Antony lifted startled eyes.
The golden bars of sunlight fell across an empty cloister.
A few white figures in the passage, seen in the distance through the open door, were vanishing, one by one, into their cells.
Mary Antony covered her dismay with indignation.
"Be off, thou impudent hussy! Hold thy noisy tongue and hang thy rattling lantern on a nail; or, better still, hold thy lantern, and hang thyself, holding it, upon the nail.

If I am piously minded to pray here until sunset, that is no concern of thine.

Be off, I say!" Left alone, Mary Antony slowly opened her right hand, and peered into the palm.
One pea lay within it.
She went over to the seat and counted, with trembling fingers, the peas from her left hand.
Twenty-four! One holy Lady had therefore not returned.

This must be reported at once to the Reverend Mother.