'

CHAPTER V

Maria Ferres had always remained faithful to her girlhood's habit of
setting down daily in her journal the passing thoughts, the joys, the
sorrows, the fancies, the doubts, the aspirations, the regrets and the
hopes--all the events of her spiritual life as well as the various
incidents of her outward existence, compiling thereby a sort of
Itinerary of the Soul which she liked occasionally to study, both for
guidance on the path still to be pursued and also to follow the traces
of things long dead and forgotten.

Perpetually denied, by force of circumstances, the relief of
self-expansion, enclosed within the magic circle of her purity as in a
tower of ivory for ever incorruptible and inaccessible, she found solace
and refreshment in the daily outpourings she confided to the white pages
of her private book. Therein she was free to make her moan, to abandon
herself to her griefs, to seek to decipher the enigma of her own heart,
to interrogate her conscience; here she gained courage in prayer,
tranquillised herself by meditation, laid her troubled spirit once more
in the hands of the Heavenly Father. And from every page shone the same
pure light--the light of Truth.

'_September 15th_ (Schifanoja).--How tired I feel! The journey was
rather fatiguing and the unaccustomed sea air makes my head ache at
first. I need rest, and I already seem to have a foretaste of the
sweetness of sleep and the happiness of awaking in the morning in the
house of a friend and to the pleasures of Francesca's cordial
hospitality at Schifanoja with its lovely roses and its tall cypress
trees. I shall wake up to the knowledge that I have some weeks of peace
before me--twenty days, perhaps even more, of congenial intellectual
companionship. I am very grateful to Francesca for her invitation. To
see her again was like meeting a sister. How much and how profoundly I
have changed since the dear old days in Florence!

'Speaking to-day of my hair, Francesca began recalling stories of our
absurd childish passions and melancholies in those days; of Carlotta
Fiordelise and Gabriella Vanni and various incidents of that distant
school life which seems to me now as though I had never lived it, but
only read it of it in some old forgotten book or seen it in a dream. My
hair has not fallen, but for every hair of my head there has been a
thorn in my destiny.

'But why let my sad thoughts get the upper hand over me again? And why
let m