peace of God that passeth understanding.  Domini, can you feel at all what that was to me?  Can you realise?  Can you—­is it any wonder that I could do nothing for him, for him who had done such a frightful thing for me?  Is it any wonder?  Soon he realised that he would not find peace with me in the garden.  Yet he stayed on.  Why?  He did not know where to go, what to do.  Life offered him nothing but horror.  His love of experiences was dead.  His love of life had completely vanished.  He saw the worldly life as a nightmare, yet he had nothing to put in the place of it.  And in the monastery he was ceaselessly tormented by jealousy.  Ceaselessly his mind was at work about this woman, picturing her in her life of change, of intrigue, of new lovers, of new hopes and aims in which he had no part, in which his image was being blotted out, doubtless from her memory even.  He suffered, he suffered as few suffer.  But I think I suffered more.  The melancholy was driven on into a gnawing hunger, the gnawing hunger of the flesh wishing to have lived, wishing to live, wishing to—­to know.

“Domini, to you I can’t say more of that—­to you whom I—­whom I love with spirit and flesh.  I will come to the end, to the incident which made the body rise up, strike down the soul, trample out over it into the world like a wolf that was starving.

“One day the Reverend Pere gave me a special permission to walk with our visitor beyond the monastery walls towards the sea.  Such permission was an event in my life.  It excited me more than you can imagine.  I found that the stranger had begged him to let me come.

“‘Our guest is very fond of you,’ the Reverend Pere said to me.  ’I think if any human being can bring him to a calmer, happier state of mind and spirit, you can.  You have obtained a good influence over him.’

“Domini, when the Reverend Pere spoke to me thus my mouth was suddenly contracted in a smile.  Devil’s smile, I think.  I put up my hand to my face.  I saw the Reverend Pere looking at me with a dawning of astonishment in his kind, grave eyes, and I controlled myself at once.  But I said nothing.  I could not say anything, and I went out from the parlour quickly, hot with a sensation of shame.

“‘You are coming?’ the stranger said.

“‘Yes,’ I answered.

“It was a fiery day of late June.  Africa was bathed in a glare of light that hurt the eyes.  I went into my cell and put on a pair of blue glasses and my wide straw hat, the hat in which I formerly used to work in the fields.  When I came out my guest was standing on the garden path.  He was swinging a stick in one hand.  The other hand, which hung down by his side, was twitching nervously.  In the glitter of the sun his face looked ghastly.  In his eyes there seemed to be terrors watching without hope.

“‘You are ready?’ he said.  ‘Let us go.’

“We set off, walking quickly.

“‘Movement—­pace—­sometimes that does a little good,’ he said.  ’If one can exhaust the body the mind sometimes lies almost still for a moment.  If it would only lie still for ever.’