“When I was here there were but six.  I remember Sister Bonaventure, thin and white, and so weak that she could not move.  She was dying far from all she knew, yet she was quite happy.  It was we who were unhappy.”

“She was happy, for her thoughts were set upon God.  How could she be otherwise than happy when she knew she was going to him?”

A few minutes after, Evelyn was bidding the nuns good-night.  The Reverend Mother hoped that when she made another retreat she would be their guest.  Mother Philippa was disappointed that they had not heard her sing.  Perhaps one day she might sing to them.  They would see how it could be arranged:  perhaps at Benediction when she came to make another retreat.  Evelyn smiled, and the carriage passed into the night.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The dawn crept through her closed eyelids, and burying her face in the pillows, she sought to retain the receding dream.

But out of the gloom which she divined and through which a face looked, a face which she could not understand, but which she must follow, there came a sound as of someone moving.  The dream dissolved in the sound, she opened her eyes, and upon her lips there was terror, and she could not move....  Nor did she dare to look, and when her eyes turned towards the doorway she could not see beyond it; she could not remember if she had left the door ajar.  Shadows gathered, and again came the awful sound of someone; she slipped under the bedclothes, and lay there stark, frozen with terror.  When she summoned sufficient courage, she looked towards the shadowy doorway, but the passage beyond it was filled with nameless foreboding shapes from an under-world; and the thought that the sound she had heard had been caused by her clothes slipping from a chair failed to reassure her.  She was as cold as a corpse in a grave.  She felt that it was her duty to explore the dark, but to get out of bed to stand in that grey room and look into the passage was more than she dared; she could only lie still and endure the sensation of hands at her throat and breath above her face.

A little later she was able to distinguish the pattern of the wall-paper, and as she followed its design human life seemed black and intolerably loathsome.  She strove against the thought, but she saw the creature leer so plainly that there was no way of escaping from the conviction that what she had accepted as life was but a mask worn by a leper.  The vision persisted for what seemed a long while, and when it faded it was pictures of her own life that she read upon the wall; her soul cried out against the miserable record of her sins, and turning on her pillow she saw the dawn—­the inexorable light that was taking her back to life, to sin, and all the miserable routine of vanity and selfishness which she would have to begin again.  She had left her father, though she knew he would be lonely and unhappy without her.  She had lived with Owen when she knew it was wrong, and she had acquiesced in his blasphemies, and by reading evil books she had striven to undermine her faith in God.  It seemed to her incredible that anyone should be capable of such wickedness, yet she was that very one; she had committed all sins, and in her great misery she wished herself dead, so that she might think no more.