e nearest
step.

After a while the church-bell rang overhead, and then (the congregation
having gathered in the meantime) the nuns came in by way of a corridor
which seemed to issue out of the darkness from under a figure of the
Virgin and Child.

They were all in white, snow-white from head to foot, with a glimmer of
blue scapular beneath their outer garment, and they wore long thick
veils which entirely concealed their features when they entered but were
raised when they reached their seats and faced the altar.

Familiar as I was with similar scenes this one moved me as I had never
before been moved--the silent white figures, with hands clasped on their
breasts, coming in one by one with noiseless and unhurried footsteps,
like a line of wraiths from another world.

But a still deeper emotion was to come to me.

As the last of the nuns entered, the Superior as I knew she would be, I
recognised her instantly. It was my own Reverend Mother herself; and
when, after kneeling to the altar, she came down to her seat nearest to
the screen, immediately in front of the place where I knelt, I knew by
the tremor of the clasped hands which held the rosary, that she had seen
and recognised me.

I trembled and my heart thumped against my breast.

Then the priest entered and the Litany began. It was sung throughout.
Almost the whole of the service was sung. Never had Benediction seemed
so beautiful, so pathetic, so appealing, so irresistible.

By the time the _Tantum ergo_ had been reached and the sweet female
voices, over the soft swell of the organ, were rising to the vaulted
roof in sorrowful reparation for the sins of all sinners in the world
who did not pray for themselves, the religious life was calling to me as
it had never called before.

"Come away from the world," it seemed to say. "Obedience to your
heavenly Father cancels all duty to your earthly one. Leave everything
you fear behind you, and find peace and light and love."

The service was over, the nuns had dropped their veils and gone out as
slowly and noiselessly as they had come in (the last of them with her
head down): the sacristan with his long rod was extinguishing the
candles on the altar; the church was growing dark and a lay-sister in
black was rattling a bunch of keys at the door behind me before I moved
from my place beside the rails.

Then I awoke as from a dream, and looking longingly back at the dark
corridor down which the nuns had disappea