She was thinking, now, about a stranger moving through her sleeping house in the dark, and every protective instinct of eleven years as the mother of this place rose in her at once.

She was ashamed, briefly, of how long she had let reputation lead her.

For weeks the sisters’ complaints had reached her, and her first instinct — the instinct the Church had trained into her, the instinct every institution trains into the people who run it — had been to keep the trouble quiet, to protect the good name of the house, to fear the rumor more than the thing the rumor might be about.

She saw now how dangerous that instinct was.