“I ought to have gone on the morrow to the Reverend Pere.  I ought to have asked him, begged him to remove me from the hotellerie.  I ought to have foreseen what was coming—­that this man had a strength to live greater than my strength to pray; that his strength might overcome mine.  I began to sin that night.  Curiosity was alive in me, curiosity about the life that I had never known, was—­so I believed, so I thought I knew—­never to know.

“When I came out of the chapel into the hotellerie I met our guest—­I do not say his name.  What would be the use?—­in the corridor.  It was almost dark.  There were ten minutes before the time for locking up the door and going to bed.  Francois, the servant, was asleep under the arcade.

“‘Shall we go on to the path and have a last breath of air?’ the stranger said.

“We stepped out and walked slowly up and down.

“‘Do you not feel the beauty of peace?’ I asked.

“I wanted him to say yes.  I wanted him to tell me that peace, tranquillity, were beautiful.  He did not reply for a moment.  I heard him sigh heavily.

“‘If there is peace in the world at all,’ he said at length, ’it is only to be found with the human being one loves.  With the human being one loves one might find peace in hell.’

“We did not speak again before we parted for the night.

“Domini, I did not sleep at all that night.  It was the first of many sleepless nights, nights in which my thoughts travelled like winged Furies—­horrible, horrible nights.  In them I strove to imagine all the stranger knew by experience.  It was like a ghastly, physical effort.  I strove to conceive of all that he had done—­with the view, I told myself at first, of bringing myself to a greater contentment, of realising how worthless was all that I had rejected and that he had grasped at.  In the dark I, as it were, spread out his map of life and mine and examined them.  When, still in the dark, I rose to go to the chapel I was exhausted.  I felt unutterably melancholy.  That was at first.  Presently I felt an active, gnawing hunger.  But—­but—­I have not come to that yet.  This strange, new melancholy was the forerunner.  It was a melancholy that seemed to be caused by a sense of frightful loneliness such as I had never previously experienced.  Till now I had almost always felt God with me, and that He was enough.  Now, suddenly, I began to feel that I was alone.  I kept thinking of the stranger’s words:  ’If there is peace in the world at all it is only to be found with the human being one loves.’

“‘That is false,’ I said to myself again and again.  ’Peace is only to be found by close union with God.  In that I have found peace for many, many years.’