The light disappeared, and the porthole was shut, while a second
colloquy began. On the whole, the two nuns decided to let him in, and
then there was a jingling of keys and a clanking of iron bars and a
grinding of locks, and presently a small door, cut and hung in one leaf
of the great, iron-studded, wooden gate, was swung back. Sor Tommaso
stooped and held his case before him, for the entrance was low and
narrow.

"God be praised!" he exclaimed, when he was fairly inside.

"And praised be His holy name," answered both the sisters, promptly.

Both had dropped their veils, and proceeded to bolt and bar the little
door again, having set down the lamp upon the pavement. The rays made
the unctuous dampness of the stone flags glisten, and Sor Tommaso
shivered in his broadcloth cloak. Then, as before, he was conducted in
silence through arched ways, and up many steps, and along labyrinthine
corridors, his strong shoes rousing sharp, metallic echoes, while the
nuns' slippers slapped and shuffled as one walked on each side of him,
the one on the left carrying the lamp, according to the ancient rules of
politeness. At last they reached the door of the antechamber at the end
of the corridor, through which the way led to the abbess's private
apartment, consisting of three rooms. The last door on the left, as Sor
Tommaso faced that which opened into the antechamber, was that of Maria
Addolorata's cell. The linen presses were entered from within the
anteroom by a door on the right, so that they were actually in the
abbess's apartment, an old-fashioned and somewhat inconvenient
arrangement. Maria Addolorata, her veil drawn down, so that she could
not see the doctor, but only his feet, and the folds of it drawn across
her chin and mouth, received him at the door, which she closed behind
him. The other two nuns set down their lamp on the floor of the
corridor, slipped their hands up their sleeves, and stood waiting
outside.

The abbess was very ill, but had insisted upon sitting up in her
parlour to receive the doctor, dressed and veiled, being propped up in
her great easy-chair with a pillow which was of green silk, but was
covered with a white pillow-case finely embroidered with open work at
each end, through which the vivid colour was visible--that high green
which cannot look blue even by lamplight. Both in the anteroom and in
the parlour there were polished silver lamps of precisely the same
pattern as the brass ones used by