She returned the volumes to the shelves, and remembering Mother Mary Hilda’s recommendation, she took down a volume of Faber’s works.  She found his effusive, sentimental style unendurable; and had turned to go to her room for one of the books she had brought with her when her eyes lighted upon Father Dalgairn’s Frequent Communion.  The father’s account of the various customs of the Church regarding the administration of the Sacrament—­the early rigorism of the African fathers, and the later rigorism of the Jansenists at once interested her, and, lifting her eyes from the book, she remembered that the Sacrament had always been the central light around which the spiritual belief of the church had revolved.  Her instinctive religion had always been the Sacrament.  When Huxley and Darwin and Spencer had undermined the foundations of her faith, and the entire fabric of revelation was showering about her, her belief in the Divine Presence had remained, burning like a lamp, inviolate among the debris of a temple.  She had never been able to resist the Sacrament.  She had put her belief in the mystery of transubstantiation to the test, and when the sanctus bell rang, her head had solemnly bowed; softer than rose leaves or snowflakes, belief had rained down upon her choked heart.  She had never been able to reason about the Divine Presence—­she felt it.  She had believed whether she willed it or not.  Owen’s arguments had made no difference.  Her desire of the Sacrament had more than once altered the course of her life, and that she should have unconsciously wandered back to the Passionist Convent, a convent vowed to Perpetual Adoration, seemed to her to be full of significance.

Father Dalgairn’s book had made clear to her that wherever she went and whatever she did she would always believe in the Divine Presence.  His book had discovered to her the instinctive nature of her belief in the Sacrament, but it had not widened her spiritual perceptions, still less her artistic:  the delicious terror and irresistible curiosity which she experienced on opening St. Teresa’s Book of Her Life she had never experienced before.  It was like re-birth, being born to a new experience, to a purer sensation of life.  It was like throwing open the door of a small, confined garden, and looking upon the wide land of the world.  It was like breathing the wide air of eternity after that of a close-scented room.  She knew that she was not capable of such pure ecstasy, yet it seemed to her very human to think and feel like this; and the saint’s holy rapture seemed as natural—­she thought for a moment—­even more natural, even more truly human than the rapture which she had found in sinful love.

Before she had read a dozen pages, she seemed to know her like her own soul, though yet unaware whether the saint lived in this century or a dozen centuries ago.  For all she said about the material facts of her life St. Teresa might be alive to-day and in England.  She lived in aspiration, out of time and place; and like one who, standing upon a hill top, sees a bird soaring, a wild bird with the light of the heavens upon its wings, Evelyn seemed to see this soul waving its wings in its flight towards God.  The soul sang love, love, love, and heaven was overflowed with cries for its Divine Master, for its adorable Master, for its Bridegroom-elect.