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and the world until tomorrow, and followed the dark passageway into the lesser shadows of the cloister walk. Dame Claire was just passing hurriedly toward the church, a faint, trailing odor of mint telling she had been at work with her herbs. Frevisse followed her, finding herself last into the church. Curtsying to the altar before slipping into her own place in the choir stalls, she saw Sister Cecely had after all been allowed to shift into what had been—and was now again—her stall. Kneeling there after all these years, did she feel relief, even gratitude, that the circle of her life had brought her back here? Frevisse wondered, then let go thought of her as Domina Elisabeth began the Office.
    The waning afternoon’s gloom was enough that the candles had been lighted along the choir stalls, making a softly golden glow along the two lines of heads bent over their breviaries open on the slanted ledges in front of them. The varied voices—Domina Elisabeth’s firmly leading, Dame Perpetua’s light and confident, Dame Juliana’s lately beginning to waver with age, Dame Claire’s deep and determined, Dame Thomasine’s thin but completely given over to the pleasure of prayer, Dame Amicia’s wandering in search of her note and rarely finding it, Dame Johane’s steady as a watchman’s tread, Sister Margrett’s richly weaving through the words.
    What her own voice was and how it seemed to others, Frevisse did not know. For humility’s sake, she reminded herself of that now and again, because in her early years in St. Frideswide’s she had been too often distracted from the Offices by annoyance at others’ ways and voices, had known it for a fault and struggled to overcome it, sometimes strangling it down but never being rid of it, until finally in her third or maybe fourth year of nunhood she had found herself so angry during Prime that she lost her own place in the second psalm of the Office and, in her confusion, broke the pattern of the prayer. For that, at the Office’s end, while everyone else remained seated, she had had to rise from her place, go and kneel before the altar, and kiss the hem of the altar cloth in sign that she humbly admitted her fault.
    Truly humbled, she had asked leave later that morning to speak alone with Domina Edith, and kneeling in front of her in her parlor, had confessed her trouble—had even been able to bring herself to name it a fault without being prompted—and asked for help. Domina Edith had laid a thickly veined old hand on her shoulder and said, kindly, “You are not the only one to whom Dame Emma is a trial.”
    Frevisse had startled at that. She had named no names, but Dame Emma, with a busy mind that did not run deeply, had a way, when she was not thinking about something else during an Office, of throwing herself at the psalms with a vast eagerness that had no heed for what the words meant, only for saying them as vigorously as she could, and while she was not the only nun with ways that irked Frevisse, she had indeed been Frevisse’s undoing this morning. Domina Edith had leaned a little toward her and said, as if imparting a deep secret, “She wears worse than anyone else on me, too.”
    Frevisse was so relieved not to be alone in her fault that she had burst out, “If only she prayed as if she understood what she was saying!”
    With a hint of laughter in her voice, Domina Edith had answered, “We’re commanded to sing joyfully in the Lord’s name. The psalm says nothing about being a delight to the ears of others while we do it.” While Frevisse paused with surprise at that way of seeing it, Domina Edith had sat back in her chair and added, “Now, there is your fault to be mended.”
    Frevisse had stirred restlessly at that. No matter what her intent, she had still found it hard to think of her irk at discordant prayer as a fault.
    Probably easily reading that thought, Domina Edith had said, “There is, of course, the matter of penance for your anger and