“Domini, I wonder—­I wonder if you can understand how that incident affected me.  To an ordinary man it would seem nothing, I suppose.  But to a Trappist monk it seemed tremendous.  I had seen a woman.  I had done something for a woman.  I thought of her, of what I had done for her, perpetually.  The gap in the cypress tree reminded me of her every time I looked towards it.  When I was in the cemetery I could hardly turn my eyes from it.  But the woman never came again.  I said nothing to the Reverend Pere of what I had done.  I ought to have spoken, but I did not.  I kept it back when I confessed.  From that moment I had a secret, and it was a secret connected with a woman.

“Does it seem strange to you that this secret seemed to me to set me apart from all the other monks—­nearer the world?  It was so.  I felt sometimes as if I had been out into the world for a moment, had known the meaning that women have for men.  I wondered who the woman was.  I wondered how she had loved the young monk who was dead.  He used to sit beside me in the chapel.  He had a pure and beautiful face, such a face, I supposed, as a woman might well love.  Had this woman loved him, and had he rejected her love for the life of the monastery?  I remember one day thinking of this and wondering how it had been possible for him to do so, and then suddenly realising the meaning of my thought and turning hot with shame.  I had put the love of woman above the love of God, woman’s service above God’s service.  That day I was terrified of myself.  I went back to the monastery from the cemetery, quickly, asked to see the Reverend Pere, and begged him to remove me from the cemetery, to give me some other work.  He did not ask my reason for wishing to change, but three days afterwards he sent for me, and told me that I was to be placed in charge of the hotellerie of the monastery, and that my duties there were to begin upon the morrow.

“Domini, I wonder if I can make you realise what that change meant to a man who had lived as I had for so many years.  The hotellerie of El-Largani is a long, low, one-storied building standing in a garden full of palms and geraniums.  It contains a kitchen, a number of little rooms like cells for visitors, and two large parlours in which guests are entertained at meals.  In one they sit to eat the fruit, eggs, and vegetables provided by the monastery, with wine.  If after the meal they wish to take coffee they pass into the second parlour.  Visitors who stay in the monastery are free to do much as they please, but they must conform to certain rules.  They rise at a certain hour, feed at fixed times, and are obliged to go to their bedrooms at half-past seven in the evening in winter, and at eight in summer.  The monk in charge of the hotellerie has to see to their comfort.  He looks after the kitchen, is always in the parlour at some moment or another during meals.  He visits the bedrooms and takes care that the one servant keeps everything spotlessly