bring peace to him it will be an action acceptable to God.  You will be much with him.  Try to do him good.  He is not a Catholic, but no matter.  He wishes to attend the services in the chapel.  He may be influenced.  God may have guided his feet to us, we cannot tell.  But we can act—­we can pray for him.  I do not know how long he will stay.  It may be for only a few days or for the whole summer.  It does not matter.  Use each day well for him.  Each day may be his last with us.’  I went out from the Reverend Pere full of enthusiasm, feeling that a great, a splendid interest had come into my life, an interest such as it had never held before.

“Day by day I was with this man.  Of course there were many hours when we were apart, the hours when I was at prayer in the chapel or occupied with study.  But each day we passed much time together, generally in the garden.  Scarcely any visitors came, and none to stay, except, from time to time, a passing priest, and once two young men from Tunis, one of whom had an inclination to become a novice.  And this man, as I have said, began to show himself to me with a tremendous frankness.

“Domini, he was suffering under what I suppose would be called an obsession, an immense domination such as one human being sometimes obtains over another.  At that time I had never realised that there were such dominations.  Now I know that there are, and, Domini, that they can be both terrible and splendid.  He was dominated by a woman, by a woman who had come into his life, seized it, made it a thing of glory, broken it.  He described to me the dominion of this woman.  He told me how she had transformed him.  Till he met her he had been passionate but free, his own master through many experiences, many intrigues.  He was very frank, Domini.  He did not attempt to hide from me that his life had been evil.  It had been a life devoted to the acquiring of experience, of all possible experience, mental and bodily.  I gathered that he had shrunk from nothing, avoided nothing.  His nature had prompted him to rush upon everything, to grasp at everything.  At first I was horrified at what he told me.  I showed it.  I remember the second evening after his arrival we were sitting together in a little arbour at the foot of the vineyard that sloped up to the cemetery.  It was half an hour before the last service in the chapel.  The air was cool with breath from the distant sea.  An intense calm, a heavenly calm, I think, filled the garden, floated away to the cypresses beside the graves, along the avenue where stood the Fourteen Stations of the Cross.  And he told me, began to tell me something of his life.

“‘You thought to find happiness in such an existence?’ I exclaimed, almost with incredulity I believe.

“He looked at me with his shining eyes.

“‘Why not, Father?  Do you think I was a madman to do so?’

“‘Surely.’

“‘Why?  Is there not happiness in knowledge?’