ves of
eucalyptus, its vineyard which sloped towards the cemetery. Often I
wandered in it alone, or sat under the arcade that divided it from the
large entrance court of the monastery, meditating, listening to the bees
humming, and watching the cats basking in the sunshine.

"Sometimes, when I was there, I thought of the woman's face above the
cemetery wall. Sometimes I seemed to feel the hand tugging at mine. But
I was more at peace than I had been in the cemetery. For from the garden
I could not see the distant world, and of the chance visitors none had
as yet set a match to the torch that, unknown to me, was ready--at the
coming of the smallest spark--to burst into a flame.

"One day, it was in the morning towards half-past ten, when I was
sitting reading my Greek Testament on a bench just inside the doorway of
the _hotellerie_, I heard the great door of the monastery being opened,
and then the rolling of carriage wheels in the courtyard. Some visitor
had arrived from Tunis, perhaps some visitors--three or four. It was
a radiant morning of late May. The garden was brilliant with flowers,
golden with sunshine, tender with shade, and quiet--quiet and peaceful,
Domini! There was a wonderful peace in the garden that day, a peace that
seemed full of safety, of enduring cheerfulness. The flowers looked as
if they had hearts to understand it, and love it, the roses along the
yellow wall of the house that clambered to the brown red tiles, the
geraniums that grew in masses under the shining leaves of the orange
trees, the--I felt as if that day I were in the Garden of Eden, and I
remember that when I heard the carriage wheels I had a moment of selfish
sadness. I thought: 'Why does anyone come to disturb my blessed peace,
my blessed solitude?' Then I realised the egoism of my thought and that
I was there with my duty. I got up, went into the kitchen and said to
Francois, the servant, that someone had come and no doubt would stay to
_dejeuner_. And, as I spoke, already I was thinking of the moment when
I should hear the roll of wheels once more, the clang of the shutting
gate, and know that the intruders upon the peace of the Trappists had
gone back to the world, and that I could once more be alone in the
little Eden I loved.

"Strangely, Domini, strangely, that day, of all the days of my life, I
was most in love--it was like that, like being in love--with my
monk's existence. The terrible feeling that had begun to ravage me