How they loved him, Vol. 1 (of 3) : $b A novel

How it begins

Spring was over all the land, and the April sunshine was beaming mildly on the tender green leaves and half-blown flowers in the convent garden of Ansprach. On the broad open terrace, strewn with the golden petals of the fragile and short-lived laburnum, and scented with the delicate fragrance of lilac and apple-blossom, a pair of anxious, feathered parents were vainly endeavouring, by means of continuous twittering, to induce an awkward fledgling to return to the nest from which he had prematurely fallen; whilst up and down between the borders of primroses and polyanthuses, three or four old nuns, too feeble for work, toddled and sunned themselves, and talked together in quavering voices—He…