speak
through his window to any person. Derette, therefore, would really be
less cut off from the society of her friends in the anchorhold, than she
would have been as a cloistered sister at Godstowe, where they would
only have been permitted to see her, at most, once in a year. But
outside the threshold of her cell she might never step, save for
imminent peril of life, as in the case of fire. She must live there,
and die there, her sole occupation found in devotional exercises, her
sole pleasure in her friends' visits, the few sights she could see from
her window, and through a tiny slit into the chancel of the Church of
Saint John the Baptist, which we know as the chapel of Merton College.
Every anchorhold was built close to a church, so as to allow its
occupant the privilege of seeing the performance of mass, and of
receiving the consecrated wafer, by the protrusion of his tongue through
the narrow slit.

In those early days, and before the corruptions of Rome reached their
full development, this cloistered life was not without some advantages
for the securing of which it is not required now. In rough, wild times,
when insult or cruelty to a woman was among the commonest events, it was
something for a woman to know that by wearing a certain uniform, her
person would be regarded as so sacred that he who dared to molest her
would be a man of rare and exceptional wickedness. It was something,
also, to be sure, even moderately sure, of provision for her bodily
needs during life: something to know that if any sudden accident should
deprive her of the services of her only companion, the world deemed it
so good a deed to serve her, that any woman whom she might summon
through her little window would consider herself honoured and benefited
by being allowed to minister to her even in the meanest manner. The
loss of liberty was much assuaged and compensated, by being set against
such advantages as these. The recluse was considered the holiest of
nuns, not to say of women, and the Countess of Oxford herself would have
held it no degradation to serve her in her need.

Derette would dearly have liked to secure the companionship of Ermine,
but she saw plainly that it was not to be. When the morning came,
therefore, she was much less surprised than sorry that Ermine declined
the offer. Gerhardt pressed it on her in vain.

"If you command me, my brother," said Ermine, "I will obey, for you have
a right to dispose of me;