as nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her.
While her lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint
Jerome's noble old Latin words, her thoughts followed broken threads,
each cut short by a question that lacks an answer, by the riddle man
has asked of the sky and the sea and the earth since the beginning:
What does it mean?

What could it mean? The senseless facts were there, plain enough.
That morning she had seen her father, she had kissed his hand in the
old-fashioned way, and he had kissed her forehead, and they had
exchanged a few words, as usual. She remembered that for the thousandth
time she had wished that his voice would soften a little and that he
would put his arms round her and draw her closer to him. But he had been
just as always, for he was bound and stiffened in the unwieldy armour of
his conventional righteousness. Angela had read of the Puritans in
history, and an Englishman might smile at the thought that she could not
fancy the sternest of them as more thoroughly puritanical than her
father, who had been brought up by priests from his childhood. But such
as he was, he had been her father that morning. The motionless figure of
the Knight of Malta on the black velvet pall was not he, nor a likeness
of him, nor anything human at all. It was the outward visible presence
of death, it was a dumb thing that knew the answer to the riddle but
could not tell it; in a way, it was the riddle itself.

While her half-stunned intelligence stumbled among chasms of thought
that have swallowed up transcendent genius, her lips unconsciously
said the Penitential Psalms after the priests at the altar. At the
convent she had been a little vain of knowing them by heart better
than the nuns themselves, for she had a good memory, and she had often
been rebuked for taking pride in her gift. It was not her fault if the
noble poetry meant nothing to her at the most solemn hour of her life,
though its deep human note had appealed profoundly to her the last
time she had repeated the words. Nothing meant anything now, in the
face of the unanswered riddle; nothing but the answer could have any
meaning.

The great apostle of modern thought asked three questions: What can I
know? As a reasoning being what is it my duty to do in life? What may
I dare to hope hereafter? Angela had never even heard of Kant; she
only asked what it all meant; and the Knight of Malta was silent under
the steady yellow light of th