almost unbearable.  At night I could not sleep.  In the chapel it was difficult to pray.  I looked at the monks around me, to most of whom I had never addressed a word, and I thought, ’Do they, too, hold such longings within them?  Are they, too, shaken with a desire of knowledge?’ It seemed to me that, instead of a place of peace, the monastery was, must be, a place of tumult, of the silent tumult that has its home in the souls of men.  But then I remembered for how long I had been at peace.  Perhaps all the silent men by whom I was surrounded were still at peace, as I had been, as I might be again.

“A young monk died in the monastery and was buried in the cemetery.  I made his grave against the outer wall, beneath a cypress tree.  Some days afterwards, when I was sitting on the bench by the house of the doves, I heard a sound, which came from beyond the wall.  It was like sobbing.  I listened, and heard it more distinctly, and knew that it was someone crying and sobbing desperately, and near at hand.  But now it seemed to me to come from the wall itself.  I got up and listened.  Someone was crying bitterly behind, or above, the wall, just where the young monk had been buried.  Who could it be?  I stood listening, wondering, hesitating what to do.  There was something in this sound of lamentation that moved one to the depths.  For years I had not looked on a woman, or heard a woman’s voice—­but I knew that this was a woman mourning.  Why was she there?  What could she want?  I glanced up.  All round the cemetery, as I have said, grew cypress trees.  As I glanced up I saw one shake just above where the new grave was, and a woman’s voice said, ’I cannot see it, I cannot see it!’

“I do not know why, but I felt that someone was there who wished to see the young monk’s grave.  For a moment I stood there.  Then I went to the house where I kept my tools for my work in the cemetery, and got a shears which I used for lopping the cypress trees.  I took a ladder quickly, set it against the wall, mounted it, and from the cypress I had seen moving I lopped some of the boughs.  The sobbing ceased.  As the boughs fell down from the tree I saw a woman’s face, tear-stained, staring at me.  It seemed to me a lovely face.

“‘Which is his grave?’ she said.  I pointed to the grave of the young monk, which could now be seen through the gap I had made, descended the ladder, and went away to the farthest corner of the cemetery.  And I did not look again in the direction of the woman’s face.

“Who she was I do not know.  When she went away I did not see.  She loved the monk who had died, and knowing that women cannot enter the precincts of the monastery, she had come to the outside wall to cast, if she might, a despairing glance at his grave.