“The Profound Life” interested her equally.  The nuns realised it, but those who live in the world live on the surface of things.  To live a life of silence and devotion, illumined not from without but from within, the eternal light that never fails or withers, and to live unconscious of the great stream of things, our back turned to that great stream flowing mysteriously, solemnly, like a river!  The chapter entitled “Warnings” had for her a strangely personal meaning.  How true it is that we know everything, only we have not acquired the art of saying it.  Had she not always known that her destiny was not with Owen, that he was but a passing, not the abiding event of her life?  She looked through the convent room, and the abiding event of her life now seemed to murmur in her ear, seemed to pass like a shadow before her eyes.  At the moment when she thought she was about to hear and see, a knock came at her door, and the revelation of her destiny passed, with a little ironical smile, out of her eyes and ears.

Her visitor was a strange little nun whom she had not seen before.  Over her slim figure the white serge habit fell in such graceful, mediaeval lines as Evelyn had seen in German cathedrals; and her face was delicate and childlike beneath the white forehead band.  She came forward with a diffident little smile.

“Reverend Mother sent me to you; she is watching now, or she would have come herself, but she thought you might like me to take you round the garden.  She will join us there when she comes out of church.  But Reverend Mother said you must do just as you liked.”

The little nun corresponded to her mood even as the book had done; she seemed an apparition, a ghost risen from its pages.  Her face was a thin oval, and the purity of the outline was accentuated by the white kerchief which surrounded it.  The nose was slightly aquiline, the chin a little pointed, the lips well cut, but thin and colourless—­lips that Evelyn thought had never been kissed, and that never would be kissed.  The thought seemed disgraceful, and Evelyn noticed hastily the dark almond eyes that saved the face from insipidity; the black eyebrows were firmly and delicately drawn, her complexion, without being pale, was extraordinarily transparent, and the thin hands and long, narrow fingers, half hidden beneath the long sleeves, were in the same idea of mediaeval delicacy.

“I was longing to go out, but I had not the courage.  I feared it might be against the rule for me to go into the garden alone.  But tell me first who you are.”

“Oh, I’m Sister Veronica.  I’m only a novice as yet.”

Evelyn noticed that, unlike the other nuns she had seen, Sister Veronica wore neither the silver heart on her breast, suspended by a red cord, nor the long straight scapular which gave such dignity to the religious habit.  Her habit was held in at the waist by a leather girdle; it looked as though it might slip any moment over the slight, boyish hips, and by her side hung a rosary of large black beads.