Rosamund had changed, greatly changed, but in a subtle rather than a fiercely definite way.  She had not aged as many women age when overtaken by sorrow.  Her pale yellow hair was still bright.  There was no gray in it and it grew vigorously upon her classical head as if intensely alive.  She still looked physically strong.  She was still a young and beautiful woman.  But all the radiance had gone out from her.  She had been full of it; now she was empty of it.

In the walled garden at Welsley, as she paced the narrow walks and listened to the distant murmur of the organ, and the faint sound of the Dresden Amen, in her joy she had looked sometimes almost like a nun.  She had looked as if she had the “vocation” for religion.  Now, in her “sister’s” dress, she had not that inner look of calm, of the spirit lying still in Almighty arms, which so often marks out those who have definitely abandoned the ordinary life of the world for the dedicated life.  Rosamund had taken no perpetual vows; she was free at any moment to withdraw from the Sisterhood in which she was living with many devoted women who labored among the poor, and who prayed, as some people work, with an ardor which physically tired them.  But nevertheless she had definitely retired from all that means life to the average woman of her type and class, with no intention of ever going back to it.  She had taken a step towards the mystery which many people think of casually on appointed days, and which many people ignore, or try to ignore.  Yet now she did not look as if she had the vocation.  When she had lived in the world she had seemed, in spite of all her joie de vivre, of all her animation and vitality, somehow apart from it.  Now she seemed, somehow, apart from the world of religion, from the calm and laborious world in which she had chosen to dwell.  She looked indeed almost strangely pure, but there was in her face an expression of acute restlessness, perpetually seen among those who are grasping at passing pleasures, scarcely ever seen among those who have deliberately resigned them.

This was surely a woman who had sought and who had not found, who was uneasy in self-sacrifice, who had striven, who was striving still, to draw near to the gates of heaven, but who had not come upon the path which led up the mountain-side to them.  Sorrow was stamped on the face, and something else, too—­the seal of that corrosive disease of the soul, dissatisfaction with self.

This was not Rosamund; this was a woman with Rosamund’s figure, face, hair, eyes, voice, gestures, movements—­one who would be Rosamund but for some terrible flaw.

She was alone in the little study for a few minutes before Father Robertson came.  She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at this thing, now at that.  In her white forehead there were two vertical lines which were never smoothed out.  An irreligious person, looking at her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, “And can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates her life to His service?”