In the garden that morning Rosamund and Father Robertson became friends.  Rosamund had never had an Anglican confessor, though she had sometimes wished to confess, not because she was specially conscious of a burden of sin, but rather because she longed to speak to some one of those inmost thoughts which men and women seldom care to discuss with those who are always in their lives.  In Father Robertson she had found the exceptional man with whom she would not mind being perfectly frank about matters which were not for Dion, not for Beattie, not for godfather—­matters which she could never have hinted at even to Canon Wilton, whose strong serenity she deeply admired.  Had any of her nearest and dearest heard Rosamund’s talk with Father Robertson that day, they would have realized, perhaps with astonishment, how strong was the reserve which underlay her forthcoming manner and capacious frankness about the ordinary matters of everyday existence.

“Father, a sermon from you changed my life, I think,” she said, when they had paced up and down the path only two or three times; and, without any self-consciousness, she told him of Dion’s proposal on that foggy afternoon in London, of her visit to St. Mary’s, Welby Street, and of the impression the sermon had made upon her.  She described her return home, and the painful sensation which had beset her when she lost herself in the fog—­the sensation of desertion, of a horror of loneliness.

“The next day I accepted my husband,” she said.  “I resolved to take the path of life along which I could walk with another.  I decided to share.  Do you remember?”

She looked at him gently, earnestly, and he understood the allusion to his sermon.

“Yes, I remember.  But,”—­his question came very gently—­“in coming to that decision, were you making a sacrifice?”

“Yes, I was.”

And then Rosamund made a confession such as she had never yet made to any one, though once she had allowed Dion to know a little of what was in her heart.  She told Father Robertson of the something almost imperious within her which had longed for the religious life.  He listened to the story of a vocation; and he was able to understand it as certainly Canon Wilton could not have understood it.  For Rosamund’s creeping hunger had been not for the life of hard work among the poor in religion, not for the dedication of all her energies to the lost and unreclaimed, who are sunk in the mire of the world, but for that peculiar life of the mystic who leaves the court of the outer things for the court of the mysteries, the inner things, who enters into prayer as into a dark shell filled with the vast and unceasing murmur of the voice which is not human.

“I wished to sing in public for a time.  Something made me long to use my voice, to express myself in singing noble music, in helping on its message.  But I meant to retire while I was still quite young.  And always at the back of my mind there was the thought—­’then I’ll leave the world, I’ll give myself up to God.’  I longed for the enclosed life of perpetual devotion.  I didn’t know whether there was any community in our Church which I could join, and in which I could find what I thought I needed.  I didn’t get so far as that.  You see I meant to be a singer at first.”