in.

But the spring came and diffused its joy throughout all Nature. He
listened to the leaves, he watched the birds threading their way in the
clear air, he caught glimpses of the yellow flowers, and strained his
eyes for the green country beyond. The young birds began to take wing,
and one little sparrow came hopping into his room as often as he opened
his window in the morning and played about his feet like a mouse, and
then was gone to the mother bird that called to it from the tree.

Little by little hope grew to impatience, and impatience rose to fever
heat; but he remembered his vow, and, to put himself out of temptation,
he locked the door of his cell and pushed the key through the aperture
under it. But he could not lock the door of his soul, and his old trouble
came up again with the throb of a stronger and fresher life. Every
morning when he awoke he thought of Glory. Where was she now? What had
become of her by this time? He wrote on the wall the date of her
disappearance from the hospital--"9th of November; Lord Mayor's
Day"--and tried to keep pace in his mind with the chances of her fate. "I
am guilty of a folly," he thought. The pride of his reason revolted
against what he was doing. Nevertheless, he knew full well it would be
the same to-morrow, and the next day, and the next year, for his human
passions would not yield, and his vow still clutched him as with fangs.

He was standing one morning by the window looking through an opening
between high buildings to the river, with its hay barges gliding down the
glistening water-way, and its little steamers with their spirals of smoke
ascending, when everything in the world began in a moment to bear another
moral interpretation. The lesson of life was work. Man could not exist
without it. If he departed from that condition, no matter how much he
fasted and meditated and prayed, he was useless and miserable and
depraved.

Then the lock turned in the door of his cell and the Father and the
Bishop entered. When they were gone he felt suffocated by their praises
of his piety, and asked himself, "What am I doing here?" He was a
hypocrite. Ten thousand other men whom the Church called saints had been
hypocrites before him, and as they paced their cloisters they had asked
themselves the same question. But the mighty hand of the Church was over
him still, and with trembling fingers he turned the key again and pushed
it under the door. Then he knew that he was a co