Finally, one Saturday night, Sister Hildegarde walked into the recreation hall during the desultory hour that preceded bed, and raised her hand for silence. “Girls,” she said, “you know that a few among you have given us a great deal of anxiety this term. The four to whom I refer have caused a great deal of discontent and bad feeling this term. We call them the Devil’s walking sticks. He couldn’t get along without them. But now they are going to have a chance to redeem themselves. Tomorrow afternoon, they are going to have a chance to show Our Blessed Lord that they are sorry for their bad behavior and want to make amends. Maggie Harrington and the rest of the choir will not sing for Benediction. Instead, these four girls will go up into the choir loft and sing the hymns alone. They have had as much practice as anyone else in the school. If they don’t know the hymns now, they’ll never know them.”

I had never even imagined such a severe trial. All the girls looked at us with sympathy. No one smiled. We four went to bed and had nightmares, and woke next morning to face the worse nightmare that was waiting for us. When the moment finally arrived, near four o’clock, we ascended the stairs to the choir loft as though we were mounting the scaffold. We could hear the girls shifting about down in the well of the chapel, and we could see the white-veiled heads of the smallest girls, who knelt in the front rows. Immediately behind the students, the postulants, in their first year of religious life, would be taking their places, and behind them the novices, and at the back the black-veiled nuns. To add to our distress, we knew that five or six pairs of parents had come visiting that Sunday and that they were down there, too, waiting for us to begin. No doubt their daughters had told them that we were up here to vindicate ourselves.