“I have been several times on the point of speaking to you on the subject of my past, for if I am to come here again I feel that you should know something about me.  But how to tell it.  I had thought of asking Father Daly to tell you.  To-day is your day for confession, but last week I confessed to Monsignor, and do not like to submit myself to another director.  Do you understand?”

“Father Daly is an excellent, worthy man, the convent is under the greatest obligations to him, but I could not recommend him as a very enlightened director of souls.  That is why the nuns tell me all their troubles.  I should like you to feel that you can tell me everything.”

“Reverend Mother, if you did not pass from the schoolroom to the convent like Veronica, you will have heard, you must know, that the life of an opera singer is generally a sinful life.  I was very young at the time, only one-and-twenty.  I knew that I had a beautiful voice, and that my father could not teach me to sing.  But it was not for self-interest that I left him; I was genuinely in love with Sir Owen Asher.  He was very good to me; he wanted to marry me; from the world’s point of view I was very successful, but I was never happy.  I felt that I was living a sinful life, and we cannot go on doing what we feel to be wrong and still be happy.  Night after night I could not sleep.  My conscience kept me awake.  I strove against the inevitable, for it is very difficult to change one’s life from end to end, but there was no help for it.”

Her story, as she told it, seemed to her very wonderful, more wonderful than she had thought it was, and she would have liked to have told the Reverend Mother all the torment and anguish of mind she had gone through.  But she felt that she was on very thin ice, and trembled inwardly lest she was shocking the nun.

It was exciting to tell that it was her visit to the convent that had brought about her repentance; how that very night her eyes had opened at dawn, and she had seen clearly the wickedness of her life, and she could not refrain from saying that it was Owen Asher’s last letter, in which he said that at all hazards he would save her from losing herself in religion, that had sent her to Monsignor for advice.  She noticed her omission of all mention of Ulick, and it seemed to her strange that she could still be interested in her sins, and at the same time genuinely determined to reform her life.  The nun sat looking at her, thinking what answer she should make, and Evelyn wondered what that answer would be.

“We shall pray for you....  You will not fall into sin again; it is our prayers that enable men to overcome their passions.  Were it not for our prayers, God would have long ago destroyed the world.  Think of the times of persecution and sacrilege, when prayer only survived in the monasteries.”

Evelyn could not but acquiesce:  a world without prayer would be an intolerable world, as unendurable to man as to God.  But if the Reverend Mother’s explanation were a true one!  If these poor forsakers of the world were in truth the saviours of the world, without whose aid the world would have perished long since!