life of a woman; many women lived, really lived, only in and through their lovers, their husbands, their children; but what woman lived in and through the life of the place?  She had only to compare mentally the loss of Welsley with—­say—­the loss of Dion, the new Dion, to realize how little Welsley really meant to her.  Certainly she loved it as a place, but probably a woman can only love a place with a bit of her.

And yet to-day, she certainly felt depressed.  Even the thought of the nursery tea did not drive the depression from her.

She opened the book she had brought from the house.  It was a volume of Browning’s poems.  She had opened it at hap-hazard, and now her eyes rested on these words, words loved almost above all others by one of the greatest souls that ever spent itself for England: 

     “I go to prove my soul! 
     I see my way as birds their trackless way
     I shall arrive!  What time, what circuit first
     I ask not; but unless God send His Hail
     Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow,
     In some time, His good time!—­I shall arrive: 
     He guides me and the bird.  In His good time!”

She read the lines three—­four times.  Then she laid the book down on her knees and sat very still.  Consciously she tried to withdraw herself, to pass into meditation carrying the poem with her.

     “I see my way as birds their trackless way—­I shall arrive!”

Rosmund was gazing downward at a coping of worn brick on which she had set her feet, but she did not see it now.  She saw migratory birds traveling steadily through a vast expanse of gray sky; birds that were going, at the appointed time, to some far-distant place, in search of a golden climate, in search of the sun.  Inevitably they would come into the golden climate, inevitably they would find the sun which they needed.  Like them she was traveling through a vast gray expanse, the life of the world.  Robin and Dion were with her.  They were seeking the sun which they needed.  Surely, like the birds, they would find the sun at last.  She had thought to seek her way deliberately.  When she was quite a girl it had seemed to her that the human being had the power, and was therefore almost under the obligation, to find the way to God for herself.  When she had contemplated entering the religious life the thought at the back of her mind had perhaps been something like this:  “I’ll conquer the love and the mercy of God by my own exertions; I’ll find the way to God by my own ingenuity and determination in searching it out.”  Possibly she had never quite simply and humbly said in her soul, with Newman, “Be Thou my Guide.”  Now, as she sat in the garden, with the image of the migratory birds in her mind, she thought, “The birds do that.  They give themselves to the sky, and God does the rest.  He knows the way by which each human soul can best go back to that from which once it issued forth.”  Perhaps as a Sister, leading the hidden secluded life, she could not have found the way; perhaps she had to find it in the world, through Dion with whom she had united herself, or through Robin to whom she had given birth.