selfish sadness.  I thought:  ’Why does anyone come to disturb my blessed peace, my blessed solitude?’ Then I realised the egoism of my thought and that I was there with my duty.  I got up, went into the kitchen and said to Francois, the servant, that someone had come and no doubt would stay to dejeuner.  And, as I spoke, already I was thinking of the moment when I should hear the roll of wheels once more, the clang of the shutting gate, and know that the intruders upon the peace of the Trappists had gone back to the world, and that I could once more be alone in the little Eden I loved.

“Strangely, Domini, strangely, that day, of all the days of my life, I was most in love—­it was like that, like being in love—­with my monk’s existence.  The terrible feeling that had begun to ravage me had completely died away.  I adored the peace in which my days were passed.  I looked at the flowers and compared my happiness with theirs.  They blossomed, bloomed, faded, died in the garden.  So would I wish to blossom, bloom, fade—­when my time came—­die in the garden—­always in peace, always in safety, always isolated from the terrors of life, always under the tender watchful eye of—­of—­Domini, that day I was happy, as perhaps they are—­perhaps—­the saints in Paradise.  I was happy because I felt no inclination to evil.  I felt as if my joy lay entirely in being innocent.  Oh, what an ecstasy such a feeling is!  ’My will accord with Thy design—­I love to live as Thou intendest me to live!  Any other way of life would be to me a terror, would bring to me despair.’

“And I felt that—­intensely I felt it at that moment in heart and soul.  It was as if I had God’s arms round me, caressing me as a father caresses his child.”

He moved away a step or two in the sand, came back, and went on with an effort: 

“Within a few minutes the porter of the monastery came through the archway of the arcade followed by a young man.  As I looked up at him I was uncertain of his nationality.  But I scarcely thought about it—­except in the first moment.  For something else seized my attention—­the intense, active misery in the stranger’s face.  He looked ravaged, eaten by grief.  I said he was young—­perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven.  His face was rather dark-complexioned, with small, good features.  He had thick brown hair, and his eyes shone with intelligence, with an intelligence that was almost painful—­somehow.  His eyes always looked to me as if they were seeing too much, had always seen too much.  There was a restlessness in the swiftness of their observation.  One could not conceive of them closed in sleep.  An activity that must surely be eternal blazed in them.

“The porter left the stranger in the archway.  It was now my duty to attend to him.  I welcomed him in French.  He took off his hat.  When he did that I felt sure he was an Englishman—­by the look of him bareheaded—­and I told him that I spoke English as well as French.  He answered that he was at home in French, but that he was English.  We talked English.  His entrance into the garden had entirely destroyed my sense of its peace—­even my own peace was disturbed at once by his appearance.