e has seemed a
sort of lull for the last day or two--ever since All Souls' Day, in
fact. Perhaps something is going to happen. It's all right, anyhow. It
seems very odd to me that all this kind of thing is perfectly well known
to priests. I thought I was the first person who had ever felt quite
like this.

"I must add one thing. Father H. asked me whether I didn't feel I had a
vocation to the Religious Life; he told me that from everything he could
see, I had, and that my coming to the monastery was simply providential.

"Well, I don't agree, and I have told him so. I haven't the least idea
what is going to happen next; but I know, absolutely for certain, that I
have got to go on with the Major and Gertie to East London. Gertie will
have to be got away from the Major somehow, and until that is done I
mustn't do anything else.

"I have written all this down as plainly as I can, because I promised
Father H. I would."

PART III

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Partington was standing at the door of her house towards sunset,
waiting for the children to come back from school.

Her house is situated in perhaps the least agreeable street--Turner
Road--in perhaps the least agreeable district of East London--Hackney
Wick. It is a disagreeable district because it isn't anything in
particular. It has neither the tragic gayety of Whitechapel nor the
comparative refinement of Clapton. It is a large, triangular piece of
land, containing perhaps a square mile altogether, or rather more,
approached from the south by the archway of the Great Eastern Railway,
defined on one side by the line, and along its other two sides, partly
by the river Lea--a grimy, depressed-looking stream--and partly by the
Hackney Marshes--flat, dreary wastes of grass-grown land, useless as
building ground and of value only for Saturday afternoon recreations of
rabbit coursing and football. The dismalness of the place is beyond
description at all times of the year. In winter it is bleak and chilly;
in summer it is hot, fly-infested, and hideously and ironically
reminiscent of real fields and real grass. The population is calculated
to change completely about every three years, and I'm sure I am not
surprised. It possesses two important blocks of buildings besides the
schools--a large jam factory and the church and clergy-house of the Eton
Mission.

Turner Road is perhaps the most hopeless of all the dozen and a half of
streets. (It is marked black, by t