His voice broke.  When he stopped speaking Domini was again conscious of the music in the city.  She remembered that earlier in the night she had thought of it as the music of a great festival.

“I resolved to enter the life of prayer, the most perfect life of prayer.  I resolved to become a ‘religious.’  It seemed to me that by so doing I should be proving in the finest way my love for my mother.  I should be, in the strongest way, helping her.  Her life was prayer for my dead father and love for her children.  By devoting myself to the life of prayer I should show to her that I was as she was, as she had made me, true son of her womb.  Can you understand?  I had a passion for my mother, Domini—­I had a passion.  My brother tried to dissuade me from the monastic life.  He himself was going into business in Tunis.  He wanted me to join him.  But I was firm.  I felt driven towards the cloister then as other men often feel driven towards the vicious life.  The inclination was irresistible.  I yielded to it.  I had to bid good-bye to my mother.  I told you—­she was the passion of my life.  And yet I hardly felt sad at parting from her.  Perhaps that will show you how I was then.  It seemed to me that we should be even closer together when I wore the monk’s habit.  I was in haste to put it on.  I went to the monastery of El-Largani and entered it as a novice of the Trappistine order.  I thought in the great silence of the Trappists there would be more room for prayer.  When I left my home and went to El-Largani I took with me one treasure only.  Domini, it was the little wooden crucifix you pinned upon the tent at Arba.  My mother gave it to me, and I was allowed to keep it.  Everything else in the way of earthly possessions I, of course, had to give up.

“You have never seen El-Largani, my home for nineteen years, my prison for one.  It is lonely, but not in the least desolate.  It stands on a high upland, and, from a distance, looks upon the sea.  Far off there are mountains.  The land was a desert.  The monks have turned it, if not into an Eden, at least into a rich garden.  There are vineyards, cornfields, orchards, almost every fruit-tree flourishes there.  The springs of sweet waters are abundant.  At a short way from the monastery is a large village for the Spanish workmen whom the monks supervise in the labours of the fields.  For the Trappist life is not only a life of prayer, but a life of diligent labour.  When I became a novice I had not realised that.  I had imagined myself continually upon my knees.  I found instead that I was perpetually in the fields, in sun, and wind, and rain—­that was in the winter time—­working like the labourers, and that often when we went into the long, plain chapel to pray I was so tired—­being only a boy—­that my eyes closed as I stood in my stall, and I could scarcely hear the words of Mass or Benediction.  But I had expected to be happy at El-Largani, and I was happy.  Labour is good for the body and better for the soul.