n that subject to Rosamund would be utterly impotent, that
there was a threshold his influence could not cross? Perhaps really his
instinct had told him to wait, and he was not a moral coward. For to
strive against a woman's deep feeling is surely to beat against the
wind. When men do certain things all women look upon them with an
inevitable disdain, as children being foolish in the dark.

Had he secretly feared to seem foolish in Rosamund's eyes?

He wondered, genuinely wondered.

On the following morning he wrote to Rosamund and asked her to come to
the vicarage at any hour when she was free. He had something important
to say to her. She answered, fixing three-thirty. Exactly at that time
she arrived in Manxby Street and was shown into Father Robertson's
study.

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, so