self-consciousness, she told him of Dion's proposal on that
foggy afternoon in London, of her visit to St. Mary's, Welby Street, and
of the impression the sermon had made upon her. She described her
return home, and the painful sensation which had beset her when she
lost herself in the fog--the sensation of desertion, of a horror of
loneliness.

"The next day I accepted my husband," she said. "I resolved to take the
path of life along which I could walk with another. I decided to share.
Do you remember?"

She looked at him gently, earnestly, and he understood the allusion to
his sermon.

"Yes, I remember. But,"--his question came very gently--"in coming to
that decision, were you making a sacrifice?"

"Yes, I was."

And then Rosamund made a confession such as she had never yet made to
any one, though once she had allowed Dion to know a little of what
was in her heart. She told Father Robertson of the something almost
imperious within her which had longed for the religious life. He
listened to the story of a vocation; and he was able to understand it
as certainly Canon Wilton could not have understood it. For Rosamund's
creeping hunger had been not for the life of hard work among the poor
in religion, not for the dedication of all her energies to the lost
and unreclaimed, who are sunk in the mire of the world, but for that
peculiar life of the mystic who leaves the court of the outer things for
the court of the mysteries, the inner things, who enters into prayer as
into a dark shell filled with the vast and unceasing murmur of the voice
which is not human.

"I wished to sing in public for a time. Something made me long to use
my voice, to express myself in singing noble music, in helping on its
message. But I meant to retire while I was still quite young. And always
at the back of my mind there was the thought--'then I'll leave the
world, I'll give myself up to God.' I longed for the enclosed life of
perpetual devotion. I didn't know whether there was any community in our
Church which I could join, and in which I could find what I thought I
needed. I didn't get so far as that. You see I meant to be a singer at
first."

"Yes, I quite understand. And the giving up of this mystical dream was a
great sacrifice?"

"Really it was. I had a sort of absolute hunger in me to do eventually
what I have told you."

"I understand that hunger," said Father Robertson.

Just then the chimes sounded in the Cathedral, and th