“‘Knowledge of evil?’

“’Knowledge of all things that exist in life.  I have never sought for evil specially; I have sought for everything.  I wished to bring everything under my observation, everything connected with human life.’

“‘But human life,’ I said more quietly, ’passes away from this world.  It is a shadow in a world of shadows.’

“‘You say that,’ he answered abruptly.  ’I wonder if you feel it—­feel it as you feel my hand on yours.’

“He laid his hand on mine.  It was hot and dry as if with fever.  Its touch affected me painfully.

“‘Is that hand the hand of a shadow?’ he said.  ’Is this body that can enjoy and suffer, that can be in heaven or in hell—­here—­here—­a shadow?’

“‘Within a week it might be less than a shadow.’

“’And what of that?  This is now, this is now.  Do you mean what you say?  Do you truly feel that you are a shadow—­that this garden is but a world of shadows?  I feel that I, that you, are terrific realities, that this garden is of immense significance.  Look at that sky.’

“The sky above the cypresses was red with sunset.  The trees looked black beneath it.  Fireflies were flitting near the arbour where we sat.

“’That is the sky that roofs what you would have me believe a world of shadows.  It is like the blood, the hot blood that flows and surges in the veins of men—­in our veins.  Ah, but you are a monk!’

“The way he said the last words made me feel suddenly a sense of shame, Domini.  It was as if a man said to another man, ‘You are not a man.’  Can you—­can you understand the feeling I had just then?  Something hot and bitter was in me.  A sort of desperate sense of nothingness came over me, as if I were a skeleton sitting there with flesh and blood and trying to believe, and to make it believe, that I, too, was and had been flesh and blood.

“‘Yes, thank God, I am a monk,’ I answered quietly.

“Something in my tone, I think, made him feel that he had been brutal.

“‘I am a brute and a fool,’ he said vehemently.  ’But it is always so with me.  I always feel as if what I want others must want.  I always feel universal.  It’s folly.  You have your vocation, I mine.  Yours is to pray, mine is to live.’

“Again I was conscious of the bitterness.  I tried to put it from me.

“‘Prayer is life,’ I answered, ‘to me, to us who are here.’

“’Prayer!  Can it be?  Can it be vivid as the life of experience, as the life that teaches one the truth of men and women, the truth of creation—­joy, sorrow, aspiration, lust, ambition of the intellect and the limbs?  Prayer—­’

“‘It is time for me to go,’ I said.  ‘Are you coming to the chapel?’

“‘Yes,’ he answered almost eagerly.  ’I shall look down on you from my lonely gallery.  Perhaps I shall be able to feel the life of prayer.’

“‘May it be so,’ I said.

“But I think I spoke without confidence, and I know that that evening I prayed without impulse, coldly, mechanically.  The long, dim chapel, with its lines of monks facing each other in their stalls, seemed to me a sad place, like a valley of dry bones—­for the first time, for the first time.