A Winnowing

Minutes after the doctor has written his death certificate and departed, John Weston returns from the dead a changed man. He destroys his cricket bat, invites the parish priest to come live at the manor, and calmly asks his wife Mary if she might consider joining him in pledging the rest of their lives to (separate) religious orders. She declines, and encourages him to take his recovery slowly. The neighbors regard him as slightly insane when he builds a convent for an order of exiled French nuns on a picturesque lawn behind the manor house, but under Mary's gentle guidance John slowly begins to participate in the secular amusements he once enjoyed. But as John drifts from the initial clarity of his religious transformation, Mary finds herself inexplicably drawn to the life of the nuns, setting their spiritual lives once more on diverging trajectories.