the hansom.

"I must go now, father; good-bye, darling. I shan't be away more than
seven or eight days."

A moment after her dear father was behind her, and she was alone in the
hansom, driving towards the convent. About her were villas engarlanded
with reddening creeper. On one lawn a family had assembled under the
shade of a dwarf cedar, and miles of this kind of landscape lay before
her. It seemed to her like painted paper, an illusion that might pass
away at any moment. Her truth was no longer in the external world, but
in her own soul. Her soul was making for a goal which she could not
discern. She was leaving a life of wealth and fame and love for a life
of poverty, chastity and obscurity. All the joy and emulation of the
stage she was relinquishing for a dull, narrow, bare life at Dulwich,
giving singing lessons and saying prayers at St. Joseph's. Yet there was
no question which she would choose, and she marvelled at the strangeness
of her choice.

The road lay through fields and past farmhouses, but the suburban street
was never quite lost sight of. Its blue roofs and cheap porticos
appeared unexpectedly at the end of an otherwise romantic prospect, and
so on and so on, until the driver let his horse walk up Wimbledon hill.
When they reached the top she craned her neck, and was in time to catch
a glimpse of the windmill far away to the right. The inn was in front of
her, the end of a long point of houses stretching into the common, and
the hansom rolled easily on the wide, curving roads. She anticipated the
choked gardens, the decaying pear trees, the gold crowns of sunflowers;
and a moment after the hansom passed these things and she saw the old
green door, and heard the jangling peal. The eyes of the lay sister
looked through the barred loop-hole.

"How do you do, sister? I suppose you expected me?"

The cabman put the trunk inside the long passage, and Evelyn said--

"But my luggage."

"If you'll come into the parlour I'll get one of the sisters to help me
to carry it upstairs."

Evelyn was sitting at the table turning over the leaves of the
Confessions of St. Augustine, when the Reverend Mother entered. She
seemed to Evelyn even smaller than she had done on the first occasion
they had met; she seemed lost in the voluminous grey habit, and the
long, light veil floated in the wind of her quick step.

"I'm glad you were able to come so soon. All the sisters are anxious to
meet you, you who have done