Late in the afternoon she slept for an hour in an armchair, and, a little rested, went to walk in the park.  She was not feeling so dazed; her brain was not so light, and the sense of whiteness was gone; the pains in the neck and arms too had died down; they were now like a dim suggestion, a memory.  But the greatest relief of all was that she was not thinking, conscience was quiescent and in the calm of the evening and the gentleness of the light, life seemed easier to bear.  If she could only get a night’s sleep!  Now she did not know which was the worst—­the reality, the memory, or the anticipation of a sleepless night.  She had wandered round the park by the Marble Arch, and had continued her walk through Kensington Gardens, and sitting on the hillside by the Long Water, with the bridge on her left hand and the fountains under her eyes, she looked towards Kensington.  There an iridescent sky floated like a bubble among the autumn-tinted trees.  She was then thinking of her music and her friends; she hardly knew of what she was thinking, when a thought so clear that it sounded like a bell spoke within her, and it said that the things of which she was thinking were as nothing, and that Life was but a little moment compared with Eternity, and she seemed to see into the final time which lay beyond the grave.  “There and not here are the true realities,” said the voice, and she got up and walked hurriedly down the hillside, fearing lest the fierce conflict of conscience should begin again in her.  She walked as fast as she was able, hoping to extinguish in action the conscience that she dreaded, but she was weak and almost helpless, and had to pause to rest.  She stood, one hand on the balustrade, not daring to turn her head lest she should see the spire of the Kensington Church.

She walked across the gardens, through the great groves, and sat down.  The grass was worn away about the roots of the trees and through the gnarled trunks she could see the keeper’s cottage covered with reddened creeper.  Perhaps it was the calm and seclusion that called her thoughts to the convent garden, and she reflected that if she had not accepted the nuns’ invitation to tea, her life might have continued without deviation.  She was impressed with the slightness of the thread on which our destiny hangs, and then by the inevitableness of our lives.  We perceive the governing rule only when we look back.  The present always seems chaos, but when we look back, we distinguish the reason of every action, and we recognise the perfect fulfilment of what must be.  Her visit to the convent—­how little it was when looked at from one side, when looked at from another how extraordinary!  If she had known that Monsignor was going to ask her to go there, she would have invented a plausible excuse, but she had had no time to think; his kind eyes were fixed upon her, and he seemed so ready to believe all she said, that her courage sank within her, and she could not lie