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Show Acting Alone Page 453 Chapter Twenty-Three The dawn was still inching purple across the eastern slope of the Rockies by the time she got back to what was left of Saint Paphnutius. Chaplain Bopp had a trembling postulant looking around for Polly, to summon her to his side for unspecified reasons. She was no longer under his dominion and could feel perfectly free to ignore him. But it was six o'clock and today's special event was to be at six-thirty, and Polly was not absolutely confident Sam would make it. That's why she decided to heed Bopp's summons: so she wouldn't spend the next half-hour fidgeting, waiting, imagining that Sammy's strange old "agent" had somehow contrived a way to detain him. She had just enough time to get out of her cellmate's heavy; sweetish, oily robes and into her own all-new lay clothes. Polly had already turned in her own habit, along with her rosary and her cross, not to mention her candybox and her napkin ring and her official Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration paring knife (the handle carefully sanded down where her laundry number had once been neatly carved), thus relinquishing once and for all her membership in this sisterhood. It had been the final delivering up of those dining room paraphernalia in particular that had made it all seem so irrevocably final to Polly; and she had come close to sharing some tears with Simone. But she still sometimes availed herself of the uniform, because the few times she'd worn her new lay clothes to the Holly |