She wasn’t more than fifteen at the time, yet she spoke out of her own mind.  At the time they thought she had been thinking on the matter—­considering her future.  A child of fifteen doesn’t consider, but a child of fifteen may know, and after he had seen the look which greeted his mother’s remarks, and heard Eliza’s simple answer, ’I’ve decided to be a nun,’ he never doubted that what she said was true.  From that day she became for him a different being; and when she told him, feeling, perhaps, that he sympathized with her more than the others did, that one day she would be Reverend Mother of the Tinnick Convent, he felt convinced that she knew what she was saying—­how she knew he could not say.

His childhood had been a slumber, with occasional awakenings or half awakenings, and Eliza’s announcement that she intended to enter the religious life was the first real awakening; and this awakening first took the form of an acute interest in Eliza’s character, and, persuaded that she or her prototype had already existed, he searched the lives of the saints for an account of her, finding many partial portraits of her; certain typical traits in the lives of three or four saints reminded him of Eliza, but there was no complete portrait.  The strangest part of the business was that he traced his vocation to his search for Eliza in the lives of the saints.  Everything that happened afterwards was the emotional sequence of taking down the books from the shelf.  He didn’t exaggerate; it was possible his life might have taken a different turn, for up to that time he had only read books of adventure—­stories about robbers and pirates.  As if by magic, his interest in such stories passed clean out of his mind, or was exchanged for an extraordinary enthusiasm for saints, who by renouncement of animal life had contrived to steal up to the last bounds, whence they could see into the eternal life that lies beyond the grave.  Once this power was admitted, what interest could we find in the feeble ambitions of temporal life, whose scope is limited to three score and ten years?  And who could doubt that saints attained the eternal life, which is God, while still living in the temporal flesh?  For did not the miracles of the saints prove that they were no longer subject to natural laws?  Ancient Ireland, perhaps, more than any other country, understood the supremacy of spirit over matter, and strove to escape through mortifications from the prison of the flesh.  Without doubt great numbers in Ireland had fled from the torment of actual life into the wilderness.  If the shore and the islands on this lake were dotted with fortress castles, it was the Welsh and the Normans who built them, and the priest remembered how his mind took fire when he first heard of the hermit who lived in Church Island, and how disappointed he was when he heard that Church Island was ten miles away, at the other end of the lake.