Chapter I

MANNINGHAM village fell into a state of curious suppressed excitement on the afternoon of the nuns' arrival, just before Christmas.

It was that cheerless kind of day that occasionally falls in mid-December, neither honest wintry frost nor tempestuous storm, but a heavy, weeping sky, an earth in which all seems contracted and starved; the bare trees shivered and stood patient in the wind, the pavements were damp but not dripping; there was a general sense of discomfort and unhappiness.

The entrance to the park lay on the station side of the village, fifty yards before the houses began, but a tolerable little crowd had collected to see the carriages drive up. A dozen children were, as usual, in front; a couple of tradesmen's boys loitered carefully towards the point of interest a minute or two before the rumoured time of the arrival; a little way away gathered a group of aproned women, and, behind them, in twos and threes, a dozen men.

Mary had found it difficult to arrive at exactly the point of view that lay behind the quiet, mannerly suspicion of the villagers; she had made one or two attempts, but the worst she could gather was that it was believed that these nuns were probably rather wicked in a suppressed kind of way, that they had designs — of what nature it did not appear — upon the British Constitution, and that their life was one of entire idleness and luxury. There seemed too to be a faint suspicion abroad as to the fate of English girls who should venture too closely in the direction of the new convent — a danger of some sort of bewitchment, also undefined.

She had done what she could to reassure the village by a few purposely short and easily repeatable sentences, planted here and there with emphasis.

" They are some French ladies, with an English lady or two among them, who are coming here to settle down."

"They are very good people, who just want to pray, and be left alone.... No, you won't see them about at all; but they will be pleased to see you sometimes."

But it seemed pretty useless. It was unintelligible to the English rustic mind that anyone, who had not designs of some sort behind, should wish to live in a large, rather uncomfortable-looking house, merely in order to pray, and never to go out visiting.

A kind of despair had fallen upon Mary at the railway station just now, as the train had drawn up, and out of two reserved second-class compartments there had emerged a dreary-looking company of French ladies, in indescribably sordid-looking, rather respectable dresses, with black bonnets. Most of them were spectacled; and all were nervous. They reminded her faintly of a procession of hens, rather agitated, entering a new farmyard. She nodded and smiled reassuringly, saying a few French sentences, till an old lady, stoutish, with large round spectacles, pale, pendulous cheeks, muffled round her face with a black comforter, had been ushered through the crowd, and been announced in English by an unknown voice as the Reverend Mother Prioress.

It was something of a disappointment. Mary had expected rather more of a stage effect — a certain dignity at any rate, an augustness, a few tall, dignified figures, chastened by sorrow; instead here was this reminder of a fowl-house.

She uttered a sentence or two of welcome, gave assurances that the luggage should be seen to, and after another explanation or two, had led the way to the close carriages drawn up outside, where Jack awaited them with his bicycle.

Jack had come forward, also nervous and a little awkward, had promised his assistance for the identifying and safe conveyance of the luggage; then, when all the others had been bestowed behind, Mary with the Prioress, a tall woman, obviously English, and a very young-looking, round-faced French girl — presently introduced as the single novice of the house — entered the front carriage, and the procession set itself in motion.

The horror of dreariness and agitation fell more and more heavily on Mary as they drove up the country road, passed the groups at the park entrance, and turned up through the lodge-gate. There was hardly anything to say, but she said it. Things seemed so extraordinarily different in actuality. It appeared to her like a bad dream come true. She had not realised even while the workmen came and went, and the walls rose on the hill above the house — the grey stone court, surmounted by the gable of the bleak chapel — how all this would dominate and colour all the life that she knew. Here was the house and place that she had learned to love, associated in her mind with that normal English life in which even Father Banting had been a faint discomfort — now and henceforward to be overlooked and affected at every instant by the knowledge of these Frenchwomen in the heart of it all, not two hundred yards away. The dead building had scarcely given her a hint of the impression that the living people would bring to bear. And now they were here; and actual responsibilities had begun.... She dismissed the horror with a violent effort and began to talk again, now in French to the Prioress, learning a little of the journey's adventures; now to the tall Englishwoman who sat opposite,

The face of this one seemed more homely, though not in the least beautiful. She was tall and rather largely made, thin-faced with big cheekbones and large brown eyes. She had been in the convent, Mary learned, about four years. There was a certain friendliness about her that Mary found pleasant, though she sat back silent in an instant when the Prioress made a movement to speak.

Mary made one or two attempts to point out various things as they went — the trout-stream, the group of old oaks, finally, where the road branched half-way up the park, the Hall itself a hundred yards away. But the Prioress seemed not to be attending.

" The baggage, madam — that will be all safe, will it not, with monsieur your husband? "

Mary reassured her.

" There are all our treasures there," she said; "our chapel furniture, our vestments: all that the Government would permit us to remove. And there is our greatest treasure of all."

Mary asked genially what that was — thinking it to be an old crucifix, perhaps, or a monstrance.

" It is the body of our little saint," said the Prioress, beaming through her round glasses, " our little sister Catherine."

Mary jumped, thinking she could not have heard aright.

" I beg your pardon," she said, " you don't mean "

" But yes: in a packing-case. She was a saint, there is no question. We had leave to bring it with us. She has worked many miracles, we think, already. You shall see her to-morrow, madam." Mary sat aghast.

It seemed to her the gilded pinnacle of her house of fears — the very incorporation and symbol of her forebodings. It expressed in a form which there was no mistaking the enormous gulf between her own methods of thought and those of these women whom she was bound now to befriend. To carry a dead body about! She had faced, more or less, in imagination, all those details of routine which were so entirely absent from her own instincts: the bell-ringing, the endless trifles, the silence of the new great house above her own; she had thought it possible that she could still live her own life in spite of them — for her attempt during these last four months to modify it had been a remarkable failure; but somehow the mention of this horrible dead body, transported from Tours in a packing-case, counted as the chief of the treasures— this seemed to focus in a burning-point all her terrors and unwillingness.... What in the world would Sarah think?...

She sat silent.

" Yes, you shall see her to-morrow, madam," said the old lady again...." Ah! we are arrived? "

"Yes, reverend mother," said Mary mechanically. "We descend here."

The building could not be called beautiful, yet it was not ugly. It stood here, like a contemplative in a ballroom, severe, cold, self-contained, graceful, yet with a grace that did not in the least accord with its surroundings. Obviously it was an afterthought.

The little lodge at which they stood, built, like all the rest, of grey stone, was placed exactly at the crown of the hill, where the slopes began to descend to the Hall. There was a short covered way, as Mary knew, paved with flagstones, immediately beyond the lodge, leading into the glazed cloister, court-shaped, above which ran the cells on this side and to the west. The chapel stood at the further end of the cloister on the left, the refectory to the right, and the kitchen offices beyond. In the centre of the cloister garth, where a few shrubs still lingered disconsolately, a pump and a well had their position. The whole place had been built after a good deal of correspondence, and included a walled garden approached through the tiny ante-chapel. The court and the garden formed the whole " enclosure," technically so called, beyond which, later on, no nun might pass. Visitors would be admitted through the lodge into a couple of small parlours, where a double grating would separate them from those on the other side.

The rest of the ground was comparatively unchanged, though it looked a little dreary now with the marks of recent mortar heaps and certain chips of wood that blew about in the December wind The semicircular hedge was still in place, though part of the walled garden approached it very nearly in one place. Mary had arrived at the perfectly just conclusion, more than two months ago, that the peculiar charm and value of the place had been completely destroyed, and had already made her plans for another garden elsewhere, entirely out of sight of the convent.

Well, here they stood; and at the first pull on the bell the lodge-gate opened, and one of the gamekeeper's wives, who had been educated at a convent and had volunteered to make things more or less ready, stood there smiling and curtseying. Smoke went up in the background from the kitchen chimney.

But the place was indescribably dreary to Mary's eyes as she went through with the Prioress, and the flock followed whispering together. There was a horrible newness about it all, yet it was far from bright. All was grey about them; and their footsteps, marked by the creaking of new boots, echoed dismally upon the stones. The daylight was darkening every minute, for it was drawing on to sunset, and there was no welcoming warmth of carpet and firelight to suggest a refuge from the grey world.

'They went together through the place, first to the chapel, where the white bare altar seen beyond the screen glimmered like a sheet, and the painted deal stalls ranged themselves on either side. Across the foot of the chancel the screen, not yet closed, barred the way, beyond which the nuns later would not be able to pass; and on the left again, lightly barred, rose the opening to the transept that, projecting outside the walled garden, was accessible to the public, and would serve in future instead of the chapel of the Hall for the small Catholic congregation of the district. From a door at the side of this opening there emerged the figure of Father Banting, who had been busy in the sacristy, and now after a word or two of greeting in execrable French (the poor man had a French grammar lying open in his room down at the house) stood smiling behind the iron bars like an amiable lion, until he excused himself again and disappeared to finish his work.

But worse even than the cold welcome of the chapel was the appearance of the cells and the corridor that united them on the upper floor. It seemed natural somehow that the chapel should be austere and forbidding, but the new, clean deal boards of the passage, the frosted-glass panes of the windows, both in the passage and the cells, the appalling emptiness of these rooms where the nuns would pass most of the hours of their solitude — this was too much for Mary altogether. She had seen them before, of course, again and again; but the thought that on this night women would sleep here — and that in the luggage to be brought up were no such things as pictures, or carpets, or wall-paper — this appalled her.

Each cell contained four principal objects, and no more. A bed stood against two sides — at least, what was called a bed. It consisted of a rectangular, shallow box of wood, covered now with a brown blanket; and beneath lay one of those thin straw mattresses which Mary had obtained with some difficulty from London. At the foot of the bed stood a prie-dieu^ with an enormous black painted cross hanging above it on the white wall. In the centre stood a deal table and chair; in the further corner a wash-hand stand. And that was all. There was no fire-place — a black iron radiator stood near the door. There was the pale deal underfoot; all the rest of the room was dead-white. In the twilight filtered through the frosted glass the desolation was overwhelming.

The refectory was not much better. The eternal deal was again underfoot; deal tables ran along the sides of two walls with a small cross-table uniting them. The one tolerable feature was the brown-painted panelling that rose to the height of about four feet up the walls, and suggested — faintly indeed, yet suggested — a kind of echo of a thought of comfort A radiator also stood here, near to the door.

Mary was almost dumb with dismay as she came out again with the Prioress and the Englishwoman, now known to her as Sister Teresa, and stood to make her farewells for the present at the entrance to the lodge-passage. The Prioress had entirely refused any further help in the work of settling in, beyond that supplied by the gamekeeper's wife.

" We are accustomed to work," she said. " All shall be finished to-night; and Holy Mass is to be at seven to-morrow, is it not? "

" I believe so," said Mary.

" Then nothing remains but to thank you, madam," said the Prioress, peering at her through her round spectacles; " and our Lord can do that better than I. Then if you will come to-morrow, madam, some time after ten, you shall see our little Sister Catherine."

And as Mary came out at the lodge-gate, there, among the valises and bundles, over whose disembarkment from the van Jack was presiding,she thought she discerned a tall packing-case, grim and ominous against the pale sky.

Half an hour after dinner the two were sitting in the smoking-room talking together. There was an enormous amount of detail to be discussed, and Mary at least had found it a certain safety-valve for her feelings.

They had been a curious four months since the building had once got under way, and in them again the quantity of practical things to be done and decided had been a kind of refuge from the facing of principles. Jack, as Mary had related in her note to Sarah, had once at least offered to give up the whole idea, saying that he understood better now the demand that it made upon her; but Mary would not hear of it. Since then, with a kind of furious ardour, the two had thrown themselves into work — Jack into long consultations with the architect and hours spent among the workmen; Mary into interminable correspondence, first with the nuns, then with tradesmen, and almost weekly excursions up to London. It was amazing how much had to be done. The crockery was obtained from Spain, and the cooking-vessels from France. The garden also had to be overseen, and proper selections made for its stocking.

But the end was in sight.

For an hour before dinner they had discussed details connected with the new chapel, and one or two arrangements concerning the gardeners; through dinner they had continued the same kind of thing; and now, half an hour later, by common unexpressed consent they had dropped the rest, and both sat suddenly silent before the fire.

It was a delightful little room in which they sat — the room in which, five months ago, Jack had accomplished the holocaust of his bats. In August she had found him again preparing to remove certain books on sport from the room; but on her pointing out their suitability at least for guests, he had left them as they were. (This was on the day after the flower-show, and he had seemed a little depressed that day, she had thought.) For the rest, the room was ordinary enough. A semicircle of vast leather chairs, five in number, were ranged round the fire: a deep window-seat ran from its edge; there were horns, books, glass cases of stuffed birds, a deep Turkey carpet, and heavy, comfortable curtains over the windows. No one would have suspected that it was the sitting-room of a fanatic; and Jack had begun once more to make it his sitting-room, and had acquiesced in its appearance.

In fact, in a good many ways he had shown his reasonableness after the first excitement had expired. He still said his office (Mary had peeped at him more than once from an upper window, going up and down the broad walk beneath); he meditated, frowning rather, for a smart half-hour each morning; he went to the Sacraments once a week, and to Mass every day. But in other matters he had gone on very much as before. He had pointed out to her that his position certainly did go for something; saying that Father Banting agreed with him; and that, on reflection, he considered he had been rather hasty in determining to give up all social duties. He now took a glass of wine again at dinner, though he had not yet resumed smoking; and he still refused to have a man-servant of his own. The butler now looked after his clothes.

On the whole Mary was content with him. He was now what would be called an excellent and devout Catholic; there was very little trace of the fanatic about him.

And Mary?

Well, the account that Sarah would have given of her — in fact did give of her, fairly frequently — was that she was perfectly charming, though a little given to brooding sometimes. She no longer said the kind of things she used to say — except during one week in October, when she had raged about as usual, denouncing the convent, Jack, religion, herself, and everyone concerned. But she had repented of this so abjectly, explaining with such misery in her eyes that she had been maddened by neuralgia, that this scarcely counted. Obviously there was something going on in Mary that Sarah did not understand. It hardly seemed probable, as Jim had pointed out before he had left for Scotland in the summer, that a conversation with Jack and two with Lady Carberry should have worked a complete conversion of outlook. But as to what the other element was Sarah had no idea. She had fished, with ill-success. Veils had descended upon Mary's eyes, and her face had fallen a little. Sarah dismissed the whole affair — at least she said she dismissed it, though she continually pulled it back to look at it again — by attributing it to that Catholic temperament so inexplicable to other people.

Here then the two sat — Jack and Mary — suddenly silent before the smoking-room fire.

For some while Mary was not conscious of it. Their last words had been as to having breakfast at half-past eight in future instead of half-past nine. This appeared as a necessity, since Mass was to be in future an hour earlier than usual. And from that point Mary had run on, thought by thought, dwelling on little vignettes of memory — on the Prioress's spectacled face, the deal boards of the cells and corridors, and the rest. She began to picture to herself the life there, so far as she knew it — the silent row of figures passing in the dead night hours to prayer, the hooded faces in the refectory, the interminable silences, the even more interminable "recreations," at which all must talk, in whatever mood. She passed on again to consider the packing-case and its contents... the grimness of the thought of the body of this French peasant-girl, as she probably had been, being hauled about on railways and a steamer, guarded by jealous, anxious eyes, stored now in some little white room, probably the refectory — these nuns had no imagination — till its translation into the white iron-barred church.

So she sat thinking, staring into the wood fire unconscious of all save her own thoughts.

She was disturbed by a small sound, faintly familiar, and looked up.

Jack also, it seemed, was meditating. He lay there in the deep chair, also staring at the fire, frowning a little as he stared, and further holding in his hand to his mouth a small wooden object, through which he was sucking in a contemplative manner, with a hollow and whistling sound.

Mary perceived it was an empty pipe.

" There! " she said. " You're a backslider! "

Jack smiled lazily and said nothing. They were both rather tired with the labours of the day.

How nice and clean he looked, thought Mary.

Never, even in the first days of his enthusiasm, had he omitted to dress for dinner. He lay there now with his long legs extended. One shoe had fallen off from a large foot, and his toes twisted luxuriously up and down before the blaze. His chin was sunk on his white shirt-front, and his eyes blinked at the fire. He looked extraordinarily comfortable and pleasing to the eye.

Then Mary thought again of the nuns, and sat up instinctively.

" You lazy pig," she said; " and think of those poor creatures up there in the cold."

Jack smiled again and made a small contented noise. Plainly he was sleepy.

" Oh, Jack, what a dear you are to have done all that! They are so happy. What a brilliant idea it was! And they're really there."

" Yes, they're really there," murmured Jack. " It's finished; and Mass to-morrow at seven. Don't forget."

" It seems awfully luxurious to them, you know," went on Mary. " It's only out of concession to us."

"No. Is that so?"

" It's about four in France, you know, or five or six. I forget, but it's certainly long before seven."

" Oh! " said Jack.

Then he added, " Oh, by the way, I'm going out for a ride to-morrow."

" That's excellent," said Mary.

Again there fell a long silence. Mary went on thinking. There were a thousand things to think of. She rehearsed again the past, the present, and the future.

She began to feel rather sleepy at last. The fire swam up more than once before her eyes, and dropped down again with a jerk into its place as she winked the sleep away. Finally she sat bolt upright and looked at Jack with that kind of reproachfulness with which an awakened dozer always regards the rest of the company.

But she need not have done so. Jack himself was sleeping like a child. The pipe had fallen from his fingers and reposed against his cheek.

in

The weather was no better next morning, nor even satisfactorily worse. The same grey clouds fled across the sky, the same wind shrilled uncomfortably with spatters of rain, as Mary, after interviewing the housekeeper, set out in furs to pay her visit.

She had been to Mass in the early morning, a minute or two late, with Jack five minutes later again; but that did not count, so to speak. One sped only over the ground in the dark, carrying a lantern, and back again. The Mass itself had been oddly dreary in that bare sanctuary, seen through iron bars, with the single figure of the priest moving about, the tiny server from the village motionless on his heels, the naked glimmer of candle-flames seen against the white stone surfaces. It was too queer to arouse any emotions but that of curiosity, and a faint contemplative wonder as to the process of events that had made it a fact. One thing only thrilled her to the least degree — the knowledge that out of sight, behind the screen she had seen yesterday, kneeled in deal stalls seventeen Frenchwomen and an Englishwoman who thirty-six hours ago had crossed the Channel from home to exile....

They had talked a little at breakfast; Jack had displayed slight symptoms of a morning crossness, and had presently sunk into a study of the Westminster Gazette of the evening before. He said he was going to ride at twelve.

The door of the lodge was opened to her by Mrs. Truman, the gamekeeper's wife — a thin, active, energetic woman with Irish eyes.

" Mother says, will you step into the parlour, please, ma'am."

It was a bleak little room this, on the right-hand side, carpeted like the other — and these the only two in the building — with new cocoa-nut matting. A small rosewood table stood here, and an early Victorian sofa in green ribbed silk that had once done duty in Mary's mother's schoolroom. These things had been placed here by Mary herself; but there hung now on the wall opposite the door an astonishing picture, framed in black shiny wood with gilt pins at its corners, representing, in oleograph, a woman in a Carmelite habit, clasping in her hand the feathered end of an arrow apparently piercing her heart, while her eyes — and no wonder, thought Mary — were turned upwards with a painful expression. In order that there might be no mistake, the words " Sainte Therese" were printed at the foot in gold letters. Mary gazed at this object in horror, wondering what was the emotion for which it stood, or which was proposed to be elicited.

Then she looked at the side opposite the window, and examined the gratings which she had watched in process of erection. The entire wall consisted of grating — on this side of iron bars set trellis-fashion; and from each point of crossing protruded forward a short iron spike. Then, after a space of the thickness of the wall, came a second grating of horizontal wood, and behind that blackness. The blackness was new to Mary.

She sat down after a moment or two, wondering as to the reason of her having been shown in here and the cause of the delay; but almost simultaneously there came a little sound from the convent side, and one square of the blackness vanished. In its place appeared the head and shoulders of a human being, swathed in black, with a glint of brown beneath. No face was visible.

" Good day, madam," came a voice in French.

Mary made her greetings, understanding that it was the Prioress who spoke, and drew her chair a little nearer.

"You will pardon me for not having received you in the cloister," went on the voice. " I thought it better that we should begin at once as we shall continue. The enclosure is not yet commenced; but we had best act as if it were. You will pardon me, madam?"

" Why, of course," said Mary, a little disconcerted all the same.

" And monsieur, your husband, our benefactor — he is well? "

" Oh, Jack's always well," said Mary — " except last summer " Her voice faltered.

"Ah, but so many prayers will be offered for him here," went on the tranquil old voice, "for his goodness to us. Our Lord will surely reward him a hundredfold."

" I hope you are all comfortable," said Mary, conscious that the word was scarcely the right one in this place. But it was taken up enthusiastically.

"Comfortable! Why, yes; it is luxury; it is too good for poor nuns."

" Isn't it dreadfully damp? "

" Ah no; the walls perspire a little; but it is nothing. We shall work the better, to keep ourselves warm."

" Surely it is bitterly cold," said Mary, suddenly aware of the fact. " The furnace — is that all right? "

"It will serve us very well," said the voice.

" Is it lighted? " demanded Mary, putting out her gloved hand to the radiator beside her.

" We have not kindled it yet," said the voice. "We have had so little time. But we shall do it presently. And you have come to see our little sister. Well, she is in the chapel now, all ready; we shall place her in her tomb this afternoon. You will come to the little ceremony? "

Mary had a sudden revulsion.

" I think not, reverend mother. I — I half expect visitors this afternoon; and you see "

" I comprehend perfectly, madam. Then you shall pay your devotions to her this morning; she is all ready by the screen. But wait, madam; let me tell you of her first."

Mary sat and listened as in a dream, while the story was told. It will be told again publicly, some day, no doubt, in a certain court in Rome; but nothing would persuade me to tell it now. It concerned, as Mary had half guessed, the life of a French peasant-girl, and nine-tenths of it would be entirely devoid of interest to most English people — a life lived behind bars like those through which Mary stared, of small obediences, of sayings, of minute actions, of rhapsodies; and the tenth part of it would be regarded as medieval nonsense; of rose leaves, of sick persons healed, of a broken bone restored, and of what the Prioress called " Spiritual Favours." It seemed amazingly unconvincing to Mary— full of holes through which a coach could be driven, of omissions, of exaggerations; yet the old voice went on, serene and confident, with a little ring of complacency infinitely pathetic.

"And she was one of my daughters," ended the old motherly voice. " I received her at seventeen years of age, and she went to our Lord when but twenty-two."

Mary asked what seemed to her an intelligent question or two, rustled as if interested; and in her heart despaired.

" And you will come and see her now, madam, and ask her prayers for yourself and your dear husband and for us all? Will you pass round the garden, madam, and enter through the sacristy?"

" One moment, mother. May I see Sister Teresa?"

" Afterwards, madam," said the voice firmly.

It seemed stranger than ever to pass on such an errand over that familiar lawn outside, now grey with December growth, through a gap cut in the hedge, to the new little doorway of the sacristy. Father Banting was there again, and a tray, from which he had breakfasted a couple of hours earlier, still rested on the table in the middle. He greeted her with that nervous little manner he had always shown, and himself took her through into the sanctuary. The two genuflected side by side, and then approached the grating. Mary's heart beat, quick and hot, as she observed that that part of the screen had been removed through which the nuns received Holy Communion, and that there lay beyond, guarded by the Prioress, a long box, supported on trestles, covered with a white cloth.

She knelt down, hardly knowing what she did.

The next instant, as, without a word, the veiled figure swept aside the cloth, she knelt, suddenly gone white, staring at what was disclosed.

Certainly it was a human figure that lay there; that could be seen by the shape and the attitude; but it took two or three seconds before she understood that she looked indeed upon the face of a girl. The head was shrouded in a hood, and a veil passed below the chin; and in the midst, a grey-brown thing lay, with sharp jutting nose, a slightly prominent chin, sunken eyes, and a sunken mouth like a cut. The texture seemed that of polished wood; and two hands, of the same aspect, crossed on the breast, and emerging from wide sleeves, held a rosary and a crucifix in the fingers. One thing only relieved the horror — the incapability of the imagination to grasp that this had once been a human being.

There was a dead silence as she looked. Father Banting behind, either standing or kneeling — she did not know which — was as still as death itself. The Prioress was motionless.

Time meant very little as the moments went by: there was nothing to measure them by. And at last, as she still stared — with every instinct of repugnance and terror mounting at every second, the; standing figure stooped, kissed that wooden, shiny forehead once, as a mother might kiss a sleeping child. Then the cloth swept softly into place again, was smoothed down and adjusted; and Mary drew a long breath and stood up.

" You have prayed well for us all, have you not? '* whispered the old voice.

The parlour seemed scarcely the same place when Mary found herself back in it a minute or two later. It had become indifferent; it no longer mattered, in face of the horror that had fallen and enveloped her.... She did all mechanically — passed again through the daylight, in again through the lodge-door, and so to the parlour and sat down. Time and space seemed, so to speak, flat and superficial; to be but scenery for the reality of that grey, fallen face with sunken eyes and mouth. There lay a kind of dazing blankness on her, in which she was scarcely conscious of herself.

So she sat down mechanically and waited; no longer interested in the thought of the Englishwoman she was about to see. She wondered only whether the Prioress had noticed the shocking impression that had been made upon her.

Then again the curtain disappeared; and this time she was allowed to see plainly the nun who spoke to her. The swathed face seemed very different from that of the bonneted, black-dressed woman whom she had seen first as Sister Teresa. The lines of it were infinitely more graceful. In spite of herself, Mary glanced at her with interest; yet again and again there recurred the vision of terror she had seen in the chapel.

For a while Mary said little or nothing except the most ordinary remarks; but she watched the big eyes with the dark beneath them, the thin nose and the sensitive lips. This was an Englishwoman, she reminded herself, of one blood with herself. Then suddenly the lethargy passed and she became interested.

" You are a convert, you say? "

" I was a convert when I was about eighteen. My father was a Wesleyan minister."

" Ah! And did he— what did he do? You don't mind my asking these questions? "

" I never saw him again," said the nun simply.

There was a pause.

"Tell me something about the life," said Mary suddenly. " Don't you get fearfully tired? "

" Oh, yes; but it's different somehow. There's not time to get tired in the ordinary way." (The nun smiled.) " At least there's no time to think about it, which comes to the same thing. We always sit upright, you know."

" Upright! Do you mean you never lean back? "

" No, it's our custom. Oh, you soon get accustomed to it. It's just habit."

"But — but what do you do? I mean what outward work?"

" Well, my work was always the garden. I expect it will be so here. I'm quite a tolerable gardener."

" But in your habit! " exclaimed Mary, glancing at what she could see of the heavy brown folds.

"Oh, we've a way of tucking that aside. It's a great pleasure to have the garden to do."

Suddenly Mary realised that the nun was kneeling, not sitting, on the other side of the grating. There was a little stool behind her; and for the rest, just the deal floor, the walls and the ceiling. Then, once more, the whole thing rushed on her (as blood rushes back to compressed veins) — the amazing hardness of the life, and its absolute mad folly as judged by any merely physical philosophy of the world. If the body were the real person, and the soul, at the best, but a department of it, what wildly conceivable justification could there be for such a life as this? Yet the nun looked serenely happy. And — and that grey face in the chapel was the end of it alh

Mary gripped the bars.

" Tell me, sister," she said. " How can you bear

Are you really and truly happy? "

The nun looked at her straight for one instant. Then she dropped her eyes and opened her lips to speak.

" No, let me finish," said Mary, oddly excited — she scarcely knew why. " Let me say it right out....

You won't be offended?... I've just been to see — to see Sister Catherine. Reverend Mother made me. Well, that just sums it all up — that dead body. It seems to me horrible — horrible; it's utterly impossible that God can really want that. And you all seem to me just like that — all dead and yellow, without any of the advantages of being dead...."

She stopped breathlessly, excited and shocked by herself. Yet it was exactly what she meant. The bars shook a little in her hands.

" Are you really happy? " she repeated abruptly.

The nun looked at her again.

" It's very hard to put into words," she said slowly in that thin, very slightly tremulous voice. " Words mean such different things to different people. Let me answer it like this. For no conceivable reason on earth would I leave the convent. I would sooner die ten times over. Suppose I woke up and found the whole thing a dream, and that I was living in the world, I think my heart would break."

Mary interrupted abruptly. She felt that her side was winning.

" Ah, but you aren't really happy. You've only killed your capacity for happiness — spoilt it — starved it to death. Now isn't that true? "

The nun's steady eyes lifted and dropped.

" There's a good deal of truth in that, Mrs. Weston. I don't deny that. But "

" It's exactly as I thought," said Mary, conscious simultaneously of triumph and disappointment. "I've always felt that must be so, and now you tell me it is so."

" Ah, but I hadn't finished," said the nun gently. "It is perfectly true that one sort of happiness goes entirely; I mean that things that give pleasure to people in the world after a time aren't even any temptation to us. And it's perfectly true that that comes from their being ' starved to death/ as you say. But another sort of happiness comes that's entirely different. You can't even call it happiness. It's something else."

Mary made a sound as if to interrupt.

" Let me finish, please. I can't put it into words. No one can. All I can say is that the life inside is just a different thing altogether from life outside. There's sorrow too; but that's different again. It isn't at all the same thing. It's like a new set of faculties for pain and pleasure, and another world altogether. It's all different."

Mary dropped her own eyes as she met again those of the other beyond the bars.

" Do you know the last sermon I heard my father preach? " went on the nun. " I've forgotten the sermon; but the text was, * Ye are dead; and your life is hid with Christ in God.' Well, I understood that for the first time. It was the last straw. I don't remember a word he said. I was just thinking all the while of the text, and I've been thinking of it ever since. You were quite right when you said what you did about Sister Catherine. That's exactly it."

Mary listened with a new kind of sensation enfolding her more swiftly every instant. She understood absolutely what the other meant. She saw its horror and its inexorableness, and she saw also, what terrified her still more, a glimpse of the enormous possibilities of an entirely new kind of joy that lay hidden under the horror. It was as if a great hand were on her, grasping in an irresistible soft pressure every surface of her mind and soul, and she loathed and resented the touch. She dropped the bars abruptly and sat up, rigid and resisting. Her own voice sounded strange at first in her ears.

" I think I see, sister." (She drew a long breath as the pressure relaxed.) " It's extremely beautiful; but it seems to me quite unreal — unreal to me, I mean." (Ah! that was better. Sanity was coming back like a tide. She noticed again the texture of the painted iron she had grasped just now.) " But thank you so much for trying to tell me. I hope I haven't been too inquisitive. It's always so interesting to hear other people's points of view, even if one can't take them oneself. After all, we can be good Catholics, even if we don't understand the religious life, can't we?"

" Why yes," said the nun, smiling. " It's all a question of vocation."

<! Of vocation — yes; just so," murmured Mary, drawing a long breath of relief. " I do think that's so splendid in the Church. Why, I heard a very holy priest say once that it might be a vocation for a Catholic to be the best-dressed woman in every room she went into."

The nun smiled once more.

" I must be going," said Mary. " Thank you so much."

V

A great scraping of hoofs greeted her as she turned the corner of the house, and Jack's voice sharply raised. Then, as she stepped on to the gravel sweep, she saw a delightfully distracting scene.

There revolved in the middle of the gravel two living beings, a horse and a very young groom. They faintly resembled a chain-shot, and the link between them was the bridle, which the horse had slipped over his head, and now held, so to speak, at nose-length with his head in the air.

" Get to his head, you fool," bellowed Jack, who was standing, in riding-gaiters, capless, and with a large smear of mud and gravel all downjhis back, just below the mounting-block.

The horse had that appearance of patient complacency that horses do have when they have won the first round of a conflict. He seemed to move on tiptoe and on springs, delicately prancing; he appeared to be divided between pleasure and apprehensiveness.

"Is that the new horse?" asked Mary. "I say; take care, Jack!"

Jack that instant had done a thing he certainly ought not to have done. He launched himself straight at the horse, snatching at the reins and saddle, and the horse very properly responded by an indescribable movement that left Jack empty-handed, and that pulled the groom as nearly as possible off his feet. It was obvious how Jack's back had become gravelly.

" That's no good," said Mary impulsively. " Here, let me try."

She went straight across the gravel, past her speechless husband, and took the end of the reins from the groom's hands. The horse eyed her carefully.

" Poor dear, then; did they bully you? "

" He's a beast," said Jack.

" Not at all," said Mary. " Are you, my dear? "

She was gently shortening her grip on the reins, up and up and up. The horse rolled his eyes once towards the gaitered figure with the riding-crop, and then decided to attend to this new personage instead. Very slowly the gloved hands advanced and advanced. There was a delightfully soothing sensation of his ears being pulled, and he thought it better to lower his head a little; then something went gently over it, and the next instant he was slouching forward, as tame as a cat, to the mounting-block.

" Up and down first, my dear. Now are your nerves quite quiet again? Did the nasty man jump at him and frighten him out of his wits? "

" I didn't," burst in Jack. " The beast swerved violently just as I was getting on. I'll teach him."

" No you won't. You must be quite quiet too, or you shan't get on. Now then — no; not from the block. Probably he isn't accustomed to one."

But it was no good. The horse wasn't going to be cajoled like this for one instant. Again he swerved violently, and dragged Jack, hopping frantically with one foot in the stirrup.

" There then. Will you behave? " said Mary sharply. " Give me a handkerchief."

The groom, anxious not to be left out in the cold, produced a large red bandanna so suddenly as nearly to bring about another catastrophe.

"Jim, that's not the way to quiet a horse," observed Mary. " Thank you."

The handkerchief seemed really harmless after all, thought the horse, after he had inspected it by means of long snuffles and blowings out of his nostrils. He would permit this lady to do what she liked with it. Then, of course, so soon as it was firmly across his eyes and tucked into the cheek-straps there was no more to be said or done.

" Thanks," said Jack, as he settled himself in the saddle. "Cap, Jim."

"Where are you going?" asked Mary, standing back, a little flushed, still holding the handkerchief.

" I don't know. I must see what this beast's made of."

" He's a dear if you take him right.... What's that?"

The horse pricked his ears too as a confused sound broke out from the direction of the lodge below — a strange yelping cry, the clatter of hoofs, and voices shouting.

" It's the hounds," cried Jack. " Good Lord! what a chance! "

Over and through the palings below, beyond the stream, came a torrent of white and grey specks, breaking, mingling, breaking again like quicksilver. From a group of trees appeared a flash of scarlet, then another; while round through the lodge-gate, bending sharply to the left, came a stream of riders; the hollow drumming of hoofs on turf grew louder and louder; and the shrill cheers from the village street turned thin as the bellowers tore up the road outside the park to get another view further on.

"Oh, Jack, do "

But her voice failed, as she understood.

This, then, was one more of the things that Jack had given up. He had never hunted much; but it would have been inconceivable in the old days that he should have refrained at a moment like this. There below passed the hunt; the hounds had already vanished up the park, their cry fainter every instant; the last stragglers were following; it was not yet too late to pick them up at the bridge.... She looked again at Jack.

It was not until that moment that she realised how entirely his old self had come back to him during that little struggle with the horse. He had been during those minutes so obviously himself, indignant, impatient, and very human. But even now that odd constrained expression had descended on him again: his lips looked thin and tight; in his eyes only the pair of moods still fought one with the other. Then he dropped his eyes suddenly and settled himself again in the saddle.

" I shall go round by the Carberrys'," he said deliberately. " Thanks very much for helping, Mary. I'll be back to lunch."

VI

Mary felt extraordinarily better that afternoon. She informed herself that the horrid discomfort that had descended on her during her visit to " Sister Catherine" was quite removed by her victory over Sister Teresa. It was a real relief, she said to herself, to know from a nun's own mouth that the apparent victory achieved by religious over what were called worldly temptations was nothing else but their starvation. Of course she had known so all along really, but it was pleasant to be corroborated.

She had one more corroboration, too, at tea; and she thought it really providential when she considered it afterwards. Certainly there were some unpleasant accompaniments to the evidence, but those could be dealt with separately.

It is an unhappy drawback to the possession of an old house that courteous and inquisitive archaeologists are apt to be brought by neighbours to inspect it — brought with many apologies, but none the less brought. So it fell out this afternoon.

Professor Peters did not happen to be an archaeologist, by the way; he occupied the chair of psychology at a new American university, but to the layman all these things amount to the same. He was a professor, and that was enough. He was bound to be interested in old oak, a winding stone staircase with pentacles inscribed on each step to keep devils away, and a chest covered with human skin, presumably Danish.

It was half-past three that he arrived, towed up to the house by an earnest young squire from the next village, whose name is of no importance; and ran straight into Jack, who that instant was emerging through the garden-door. There was no escape; Jack was obviously unoccupied, and after sending a message to Mary that there would be two people at tea, he resigned himself and went off with them.

The Professor was so overwhelmingly learned in psychology that he had forgotten everything else except his manners. (Professors are usually like this, except that most of them have forgotten their manners too.) He was so certain that psychology was the very centre of knowledge that he imagined it the circumference also, and sought to bring all phenomena within its radius. He made some very valuable remarks about pentacles and the modern revival of magic, alleging that the value of symbols lay in the fact that they enabled the naturally diffuse mind to concentrate itself upon the point symbolised. There were no devils, of course, and nothing in a pentacle as such; yet the Pentacle-idea could be made to counteract the Devil-idea with very happy results. He used a German phrase or two at this point, and Jack assented politely. It was all very convincing indeed.

He seemed a pleasant old man, thought Mary, as she gave him his tea half an hour later. He was neither deaf, nor lame, nor blind, as professors usually are; nor did he wear his hair particularly long. He was a thin-faced, clean-shaven man, respectably dressed, with very bright and piercing grey eyes, and a long upper lip. She talked to him, therefore, on a settee, while Jack and the earnest young squire entertained one another on the other side of the table.

When two persons are, permanently or temporarily, possessed each of one idea respectively, and talk together, it is not surprising if the two ideas are brought forcibly into contact. Mary was thinking just then of the convent; the Professor was thinking then, as always, of psychology. Within ten minutes therefore, they were discussing the psychology of the Religious Life.

" Of course, to us psychologists," said the Professor presently, " there is nothing at all remarkable in the phenomenon of persons wishing to shut themselves up in order to concentrate on one idea. Neither does it matter at all whether or no the idea is a delusive one "

" I am a Catholic," said Mary rather quickly.

The Professor made a little sound that might stand equally for assent or compassion.

"The eremitical life is, however, common to all religions," he said gently. " The Buddhist monk, no less than the Christian, is a person possessed of one idea to the exclusion of others. He finds, therefore, to be quite tolerable conditions of life impossible for others."

Mary shifted her position a little and took another piece of toast.

" I don't quite see why," she said.

The Professor smiled.

u It is a familiar phenomenon in psychological studies," he said. " A mind under the stress of any sufficiently strong emotion will be impervious to all others. If he is in love, for instance, his appetite will go. An artist will forget his meals and his duties. It is a perfectly commonplace "

" I see," said Mary abruptly. " And in their place a new set of sensations will appear."

" Exactly. The possessing idea will produce them. And, as I said before, it is of no importance whether or no the idea corresponds to fact or not."

" I don't see that."

" Well, Mrs. Weston; a young man in love will "

Mary nodded. This was a little more than she had bargained for. She retraced a step or two.

"The whole state, then," she said, "is an exalte one."

" Just so. We should call it ' morbid ' — not in any opprobrious sense, you understand: merely pathological. But we are only in the very beginning of the science. The word self-suggestion, for example. What a world of possibilities lies there."

" And you believe it accounts for all these things? "

" Undoubtedly. So far as we see at present, there is no boundary in sight. There is scarcely any abnormal phenomenon established — I may say, I think, not one — which cannot be brought under the range of this force."

A little mental vignette of Sister Teresa's face, as she had seen it through the grille, passed before Mary's eyes. She regarded it an instant. Was it really possible?

" Isn't it possible to push that too far?" she said.

The Professor made an indescribable little deprecatory movement resembling the ghost of a shrug.

" It is possible, of course," he said.

" I mean," said Mary, with a glimmer of humour in her eyes, " that it may even be true that psychologists themselves bring their main idea to bear too much on phenomena. We are all open to that danger."

The Professor wrinkled his face up in honest mirth. He was perfectly good-humoured.

" A palpable hit," he said. " You silence me."

Mary sat pensive over the fire when they went out at last. She was thinking very hard indeed. But underneath she was conscious of a considerable relief. It was at least pleasant to her pride to remember that the very trying life of the convent was not so trying after all, that if one could but be possessed sufficiently by one idea, all things became possible. "All things are possible to him that believeth."

Then what about other things— her religion, for instance; Jack's remarkable developments? Why the key fitted appallingly well.

But that's quite different, she assured herself, entirely different. Why at that rate

Then Jack came in.