at that sky.'

"The sky above the cypresses was red with sunset. The trees looked black
beneath it. Fireflies were flitting near the arbour where we sat.

"'That is the sky that roofs what you would have me believe a world of
shadows. It is like the blood, the hot blood that flows and surges in
the veins of men--in our veins. Ah, but you are a monk!'

"The way he said the last words made me feel suddenly a sense of shame,
Domini. It was as if a man said to another man, 'You are not a man.' Can
you--can you understand the feeling I had just then? Something hot and
bitter was in me. A sort of desperate sense of nothingness came over me,
as if I were a skeleton sitting there with flesh and blood and trying to
believe, and to make it believe, that I, too, was and had been flesh and
blood.

"'Yes, thank God, I am a monk,' I answered quietly.

"Something in my tone, I think, made him feel that he had been brutal.

"'I am a brute and a fool,' he said vehemently. 'But it is always so
with me. I always feel as if what I want others must want. I always feel
universal. It's folly. You have your vocation, I mine. Yours is to pray,
mine is to live.'

"Again I was conscious of the bitterness. I tried to put it from me.

"'Prayer is life,' I answered, 'to me, to us who are here.'

"'Prayer! Can it be? Can it be vivid as the life of experience, as
the life that teaches one the truth of men and women, the truth of
creation--joy, sorrow, aspiration, lust, ambition of the intellect and
the limbs? Prayer--'

"'It is time for me to go,' I said. 'Are you coming to the chapel?'

"'Yes,' he answered almost eagerly. 'I shall look down on you from my
lonely gallery. Perhaps I shall be able to feel the life of prayer.'

"'May it be so,' I said.

"But I think I spoke without confidence, and I know that that evening I
prayed without impulse, coldly, mechanically. The long, dim chapel, with
its lines of monks facing each other in their stalls, seemed to me a
sad place, like a valley of dry bones--for the first time, for the first
time.

"I ought to have gone on the morrow to the Reverend Pere. I ought to
have asked him, begged him to remove me from the _hotellerie_. I ought
to have foreseen what was coming--that this man had a strength to live
greater than my strength to pray; that his strength might overcome mine.
I began to sin that night. Curiosity was alive in me, curiosity about
the life that I had never known, was--so I believe