you are young and you are strong. Who knows what good work your heavenly
Father keeps waiting for you yet?"

John had returned to the window and was looking out with vacant eyes.

"But all this is beside my present business," said the Bishop. "There is
nothing you wish to complain of?"

"Nothing whatever."

"You are content to live in this house, under the laws and statutes of
this society and in voluntary obedience to its Superior?"

"Yes."

"That is enough."

The Bishop was leaving the cell, when his eye was arrested by some
writing in pencil on the wall. It ran, "9th of November--Lord Mayor's
Day"; and under it were short lines such as a prisoner makes when he
keeps a reckoning.

"What is the meaning of this date?" said the Bishop.

John was silent, but the Father answered with a smile: "That is the date
of his vow, my lord. It is part of the discipline of his life of grace to
keep count of the days of his novitiate, so eager is he for the time when
he may dedicate his whole life to God."

Back at the head of the stairs the Father paused again and said,
"Listen!"

There was the sound as of a trembling hand turning the key in the lock of
the door they had shut behind them, and at the next moment the key itself
came out of the aperture under it.

When the door closed on the Bishop and John Storm was alone in his cell,
one idea was left with him--the idea of work. He had tried everything
else, and everything had failed.

He had tried solitude. On asking to be shut up in a cell, he had said to
himself: "The thought of Glory is a temptation of my unquickened and
unspiritual nature. It has already betrayed me into an act of cowardice
and inhumanity, and it will drive me out into the world and fling me back
again, as it drove out and flung back Brother Paul." But the result of
his solitude was specious and deceitful. As pictures seem to float before
the eyes after the eyelids are closed, so his past life, now that it was
over, seemed to rise up before him with awful distinctness. Sitting alone
in his cell, every event of his life with Glory passed before him in
review, and harassed him with pitiless condemnation. Why had he failed to
realize the essential difference of temperament between himself and that
joyous creature? Why had he hesitated to gratify her natural and innocent
love of mere life? Why had he done this? Why had he not done that? If
Glory were lost, if the wicked and merciless world had betraye