nun

This was the cloister of the nuns, and the old woman was the Abbess.

"I'll really call in on the nuns," he said to the officers who watched him smilingly, and he rode off by the winding path down the hill.

"The sacked nun is in one of her tantrums," muttered the populace; and that was the end of it.

I had thought to see a tall, meagre, yellow, conventual image in black, with a close white cap, bandaged under the chin like a nun's head-gear; whereas, there stood by me a little and roundly formed woman, who might indeed be older than I, but was still young; she could not, I thought, be more than six or seven and twenty; she was as fair as a fair Englishwoman; she had no cap; her hair was nut-brown, and she wore it in curls; pretty her features were not, nor very soft, nor very regular, but neither were they in any degree plain, and I already saw cause to deem them expressive.

But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks almost what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my picture.

There, in his father's room, at midnight, the fire was roaring and the gas blazing; the papers, the sacred papers - to lay a hand on which was criminal - had all been taken off and piled along the floor; a cloth was spread, and a supper laid, upon the business table; and in his father's chair a woman, habited like a nun, sat eating.

"You are going to be a nun," he went on, "in a cell--for life--with a gown and white veil?"

It was none the less a fact, however, that in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril.

Finally, one day, an old fiacre stopped in front of the door and a nun stepped out.

She had made for herself a dress of some brown stuff like a nun's habit and had a crooked stick and carried all her belongings tied up in a handkerchief.