Your deliverance has been bought at no small cost, my daughter, for know that yonder coarse and ungodly man, the King's Visitor, told me as we rode that this Nunnery must be dissolved, its house and revenues seized, and I and my sisters turned out to starve in our old age.

Indeed, to bring him here at all I was forced to petition that it might be so in a writing that I signed.

See, then, how great is my love for you, dear Cicely." "Mother," she answered, "it cannot be, it shall not be." "Alas! child, how will you prevent it?
These Visitors, and those who commission them, are hungry folk.

I hear they take the lands and goods of poor religious such as we are, and if these are fortunate, give one or two of them a little pittance to get bread.

Once I had moneys of my own, but I spent them to buy back the Valley Farm which the Abbot had seized, and of late to satisfy his extortions," and she wept a little.
"Mother, listen.