ey stopped on the
narrow path to listen, looking up at the great gray tower which held the
voices sweet to their souls.

"I understand that hunger," he repeated, when the chimes died away. "It
can be fierce as any hunger after a sin. In your case you felt it was
not free from egoism, this strong desire?"

"Your sermon made me look into my heart, and I did think that perhaps I
was an egoist in my religious feeling, that I was selfishly intent on my
own soul, that in my religion, if I did what I longed presently to do, I
should be thinking almost solely of myself."

Rather abruptly Father Robertson put a question:

"There was nothing else which drew you towards marriage?"

"I liked and admired Dion very much. I thought him an exceptional sort
of man. I knew he cared for me in a beautiful sort of way. That
touched me. And"--she slightly hesitated, and a soft flush came to her
cheeks--"I felt that he was a good man in a way--I believe, I am almost
sure, that very few young men are good in the particular way I mean. Of
all the things in Dion that was the one which most strongly called to
me."

Father Robertson understood her allusion to physical purity.

"I couldn't have married him but for that," she added.

"If I had known you when you were a girl I believe I should not have
expected you to marry," said Father Robertson.

Afterwards, when he had seen Rosamund with Robin, he thought he had been
very blind when he had said that.

"You understand me," she said, very simply. "But I knew you would."

"You have given up something. Many people, perhaps most people, would
deny that. But I know how difficult it is"--his voice became lower--"to
give up retirement, to give up that food which the soul instinctively
longs to find, thinks perhaps it only can find, in silence, perpetual
meditation, perpetual prayer, in the world that is purged of the
insistent clamor of human voices. But"--he straightened himself with
a quick movement, and his voice became firmer--"a man may wish to draw
near to God in the Wilderness, or in the desert, and may find Him most
surely in"--and here he hesitated slightly, almost as a few minutes
before Rosamund had hesitated--"in the Liverpool slums. What a blessing
it is, what an unspeakable blessing it is, when one has learnt the
lesson that God is everywhere. But how difficult it is to learn!"

They walked together for a long time in the garden, and Rosamund felt
strangely at ease, like one w