Her father followed her and stood by, while she hesitated what she should take.  Smiling, she rejected a tea-gown as unsuitable for convent wear, and put in a black lace scarf which she thought would be useful for wearing in church; it would look better in the convent chapel than a hat.  Instead of a flowered silk she chose a grey alpaca.  Then she remembered that she must take some books with her.  It would be useless to bring pious books with her, she would find plenty of those in the convent.

“Have you any books, father?  I must have something to read.”

“There are a few books downstairs; you know them all.”

“You don’t read much, father?”

“Not much, except music.  But Ulick brings books here, you may find something among them.”

She returned with Berlioz’s Memoirs, Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

“I suppose these books belong to Ulick.  I don’t know if I ought to take them.”

“I cannot advise you; you must do as you like.  I suppose you’ll bring them back?”

“Oh, yes, of course I shall bring them back.”

“Evelyn, dear, is it quite essential that you should go?”

“Yes, father, yes, it is quite; but I don’t know how I am to get away.”

“How you’re to get away!  What do you mean?”

“Well,” she answered, laughing, “you see in his letter he says he’s coming to watch me.  Father, I can see that you pity him; you’re sorry for him, aren’t you?”

“Well, Evelyn, he offered to marry you, he made you a great singer, and you say he’d do anything for you.  I suppose I am sorry for him.”

They stood looking out of the window.

“You know I’d like to stop with you; it can’t be helped; but I shall come back.”

“Do you think you’ll come back?”

“Of course I shall come back.  Where should I go if I did not come back?”

At that moment Agnes drove up in a hansom; she ran up the little garden, and carried out Evelyn’s bag and placed it in the hansom.

“I must go now, father; good-bye, darling.  I shan’t be away more than seven or eight days.”

A moment after her dear father was behind her, and she was alone in the hansom, driving towards the convent.  About her were villas engarlanded with reddening creeper.  On one lawn a family had assembled under the shade of a dwarf cedar, and miles of this kind of landscape lay before her.  It seemed to her like painted paper, an illusion that might pass away at any moment.  Her truth was no longer in the external world, but in her own soul.  Her soul was making for a goal which she could not discern.  She was leaving a life of wealth and fame and love for a life of poverty, chastity and obscurity.  All the joy and emulation of the stage she was relinquishing for a dull, narrow, bare life at Dulwich, giving singing lessons and saying prayers at St. Joseph’s.  Yet there was no question which she would choose, and she marvelled at the strangeness of her choice.