ded her time
between it and the garden. It had none of the primness of the convent
parlour, which gave her a little shiver every time she entered it. In
the further window there stood a deep-seated, venerable arm-chair,
covered in worn green leather, the one comfortable chair, Evelyn often
thought, in the convent. And in this chair she spent many hours, either
learning to construe the Office with Mother Mary Hilda, or reading by
herself. The investigation of the shelves was an occupation, and the
time went quickly, taking down book after book, and she seemed to
penetrate further into the spirit of the convent through the medium of
the convent books.

The light literature of the convent were improving little tales of
conversion, and edifying stories of Catholic girls who decline to enter
into mixed marriages, and she thought of the novices reading this
artless literature on Sunday afternoons. There were endless volumes of
meditations, mostly translations from the French, full of Gallicisms and
parenthetical phrases, and Evelyn often began a paragraph a second time;
but in spite of her efforts to control her thoughts they wandered, and
her eyes, lost in reverie, were fixed on the sunny garden.

She returned the volumes to the shelves, and remembering Mother Mary
Hilda's recommendation, she took down a volume of Faber's works. She
found his effusive, sentimental style unendurable; and had turned to go
to her room for one of the books she had brought with her when her eyes
lighted upon Father Dalgairn's _Frequent Communion_. The father's
account of the various customs of the Church regarding the
administration of the Sacrament--the early rigorism of the African
fathers, and the later rigorism of the Jansenists at once interested
her, and, lifting her eyes from the book, she remembered that the
Sacrament had always been the central light around which the spiritual
belief of the church had revolved. Her instinctive religion had always
been the Sacrament. When Huxley and Darwin and Spencer had undermined
the foundations of her faith, and the entire fabric of revelation was
showering about her, her belief in the Divine Presence had remained,
burning like a lamp, inviolate among the debris of a temple. She had
never been able to resist the Sacrament. She had put her belief in the
mystery of transubstantiation to the test, and when the sanctus bell
rang, her head had solemnly bowed; softer than rose leaves or
snowflakes, belief