“‘I do not think you will trouble my peace.’

“And my thought was: 

“‘I will help you to find the peace which you have lost.’

“Was it a presumptuous thought, Domini?  Was it insolent?  At the time it seemed to me absolutely sincere, one of the best thoughts I had ever had—­a thought put into my heart by God.  I didn’t know then—­I didn’t know.”

He stopped speaking, and stood for a time quite still, looking down at the sand, which was silver white under the moon.  At last he lifted his head and said, speaking slowly: 

“It was the coming of this man that put the spark to that torch.  It was he who woke up in me the half of myself which, unsuspected by me, had been slumbering through all my life, slumbering and gathering strength in slumber—­as the body does—­gathering a strength that was tremendous, that was to overmaster the whole of me, that was to make of me one mad impulse.  He woke up in me the body and the body was to take possession of the soul.  I wonder—­can I make you feel why this man was able to affect me thus?  Can I make you know this man?

“He was a man full of secret violence, violence of the mind and violence of the body, a volcanic man.  He was English—­he said so—­but there must have been blood that was not English in his veins.  When I was with him I felt as if I was with fire.  There was the restlessness of fire in him.  There was the intensity of fire.  He could be reserved.  He could appear to be cold.  But always I was conscious that if there was stone without there was scorching heat within.  He was watchful of himself and of everyone with whom he came into the slightest contact.  He was very clever.  He had an immense amount of personal charm, I think, at any rate for me.  He was very human, passionately interested in humanity.  He was—­and this was specially part of him, a dominant trait—­he was savagely, yes, savagely, eager to be happy, and when he came to live in the hotellerie he was savagely unhappy.  An egoist he was, a thinker, a man who longed to lay hold of something beyond this world, but who had not been able to do so.  Even his desire to find rest in a religion seemed to me to have greed in it, to have something in it that was akin to avarice.  He was a human storm, Domini, as well as a human fire.  Think! what a man to be cast by the world—­which he knew as they know it only who are voracious for life and free—­into my quiet existence.

“Very soon he began to show himself to me as he was, with a sort of fearlessness that was almost impudent.  The conditions of our two lives in the monastery threw us perpetually together in a curious isolation.  And the Reverend Pere, Domini, the Reverend Pere, set my feet in the path of my own destruction.  On the day after the stranger had arrived the Reverend Pere sent for me to his private room, and said to me, ’Our new guest is in a very unhappy state.  He has been attracted by our peace.  If we can