clean.  He shows people round the garden.  His duties, you see, are light and social.  He cannot go into the world, but he can mix with the world that comes to him.  It is his task, if not his pleasure, to be cheerful, talkative, sympathetic, a good host, with a genial welcome for all who come to La Trappe.  After my years of labour, solitude, silence, and prayer, I was abruptly put into this new life.

“Domini, to me it was like rushing out into the world.  I was almost dazed by the change.  At first I was nervous, timid, awkward, and, especially, tongue-tied.  The habit of silence had taken such a hold upon me that I could not throw it off.  I dreaded the coming of visitors.  I did not know how to receive them, what to say to them.  Fortunately, as I thought, the tourist season was over, the summer was approaching.  Very few people came, and those only to eat a meal.  I tried to be polite and pleasant to them, and gradually I began to fall into the way of talking without the difficulty I had experienced at first.  In the beginning I could not open my lips without feeling as if I were almost committing a crime.  But presently I was more natural, less taciturn.  I even, now and then, took some pleasure in speaking to a pleasant visitor.  I grew to love the garden with its flowers, its orange trees, its groves of eucalyptus, its vineyard which sloped towards the cemetery.  Often I wandered in it alone, or sat under the arcade that divided it from the large entrance court of the monastery, meditating, listening to the bees humming, and watching the cats basking in the sunshine.

“Sometimes, when I was there, I thought of the woman’s face above the cemetery wall.  Sometimes I seemed to feel the hand tugging at mine.  But I was more at peace than I had been in the cemetery.  For from the garden I could not see the distant world, and of the chance visitors none had as yet set a match to the torch that, unknown to me, was ready—­at the coming of the smallest spark—­to burst into a flame.

“One day, it was in the morning towards half-past ten, when I was sitting reading my Greek Testament on a bench just inside the doorway of the hotellerie, I heard the great door of the monastery being opened, and then the rolling of carriage wheels in the courtyard.  Some visitor had arrived from Tunis, perhaps some visitors—­three or four.  It was a radiant morning of late May.  The garden was brilliant with flowers, golden with sunshine, tender with shade, and quiet—­quiet and peaceful, Domini!  There was a wonderful peace in the garden that day, a peace that seemed full of safety, of enduring cheerfulness.  The flowers looked as if they had hearts to understand it, and love it, the roses along the yellow wall of the house that clambered to the brown red tiles, the geraniums that grew in masses under the shining leaves of the orange trees, the—­I felt as if that day I were in the Garden of Eden, and I remember that when I heard the carriage wheels I had a moment of