The numerous pea-fowls had gathered in a bare roosting tree on an opposite hillside, and the immense tails of the cock-birds swept the evening sky.  Owen would have certainly compared it to a picture by Honderhoker.  The ducks clambered out of the water, keeping their cunning black eyes fixed on the loitering children whom the nursemaid was urging to return home.  In Kensington Gardens, the glades were green and gold, and for some little while Evelyn watched the delicate spectacle of the fading light, and insensibly she began to feel that a life of spiritual endeavour was the only life possible to her, and that, however much it might cost her, she must make the effort to attain it.  Even to feel that she was capable of desiring this ideal life was a delicious happiness, and her thoughts flowed on for a long while, unmindful of practical difficulties.  Suddenly it came upon her like a sudden illumination, that sooner or later she would have to make all the sacrifices that this ideal demanded, that she would not have any peace of mind until she had made them.  But even at the same moment the insuperable difficulties of the task before her appeared, and she despaired.  The last obstacle was money.  As she crossed the road dividing Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park, she understood that the simple fact of owing a few thousand pounds rendered her immediate retirement from the stage impossible.  She had insisted that the money she required to live in Paris and study with Madame Savelli should be considered as a debt, which she would repay out of her first earnings.  But Owen had laughed at her.  He had refused to accept it, and he would never tell her the rent of the house in the Rue Balzac; he had urged that as he had made use of the house he could not allow her to pay for it.  In the rough, she supposed that a thousand pounds would settle her debt for the year they had spent in Paris.

Since then she had, however, insisted on keeping herself, but now that she came to think it out, it did not seem that she had done much more than pay her dressmaker’s bills.  She grew alarmed at the amount of her debt, which seemed in her excited imagination so large that all her savings, amounting to about six or seven thousand pounds, would not suffice to pay it off.  Most of her jewellery had been given to her by Owen; there was the furniture, the pictures and the china in Park Lane!  She would have to return all these, and the horses, too, if she wished to pay everything, and the net result would be that she would mortally offend the man who had done everything for her.  She knew he would not forgive her if she sent back the presents he had made her, nor could she blame him, and she decided that such complete restitution was impossible.  But, for all she knew, Monsignor might insist upon it.  If he did?  She felt that she would go mad if she did not put aside these scruples, which she knew to be in a measure fictitious, but which she was nevertheless unable to shake off.