once we are convinced that there is a God, and that we are here to save our souls, it were surely folly to think of anything else.  Our loves and our ambitions, what are they when we consider him? and Evelyn remembered how he waits for us in an eternity of bliss and love, only asking for our love.  These were the wise ones, they thought of the essential and let the ephemeral and circumstantial go by them.  Even from a worldly point of view, their life was the wiser, since it produced the greater happiness.  Owen was a proof of this.  She remembered how he used to say he had the finest place, the most beautiful pictures, and the most desirable mistress in Europe.  Yet he was always the unhappiest man she knew.  His life had been an unceasing effort to capture happiness, and he had failed because he had sought happiness from without instead of seeking it from within.  He lived in externals, he was dependent on a multitude of things, the breakdown of any one of which was sufficient to cause him the acutest misery.  The howl of a dog, the smell of a cigar, any trifle was sufficient to wreck his happiness.  He had taught her to live in external things, to place her faith in the world instead of in her own conscience.  How unhappy she had been; she had been driven to the brink of suicide.  Ah, if it had not been for Monsignor.  She bent her face on her hands, and did not dare to think further.

When her prayer was finished, she listened to the high monotonous chant of the nuns reciting Matins.  It sank into her soul, soothing it, and at the same time inspiring an ardent melancholy.  The long, unbroken rhythm flowed on and on, each side of the choir chanting an alternate verse.  In the dimness of her sensation, Evelyn lost count of time, nor did she know of what she was thinking.  She was suddenly awakened by a sound of shuffling.  The nuns had risen to their feet, and in the middle of the floor a sister began the lessons in a shrill voice, keeping always on the same note, never letting her voice fall at the close of the sentences.  Evelyn grew more interested; the rite was full of a penetrating mystery.  She viewed the lines of grey nuns and heard the Latin syllables.  These poor nuns whom she was just now pitying for their ignorance of life could at all events read the Office in Latin.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

When she opened her eyes and saw the convent room, she remembered how she had come there.  Her still dreaming face lighted up with a smile, and she began to wonder what was going to happen next.  Soon after, someone knocked.  It was the little porteress telling her that it was seven o’clock.  Evelyn expected her to come in, pull up the blinds and pour out her bath.  But she did not even open the door, and Evelyn lay looking through the strange room, unable to face the discomfort of a small basin of cold water.  She would have to do her hair herself, and there was no toilette table.  The convent