from God, and encourage her to persevere. Then she cries to her
Divine Master, to the Lord of her soul, to her adorable Master, to the
adorable Bridegroom.

"Cannot we say of a soul to whom God extends this solicitude and these
delicacies of love that the soul has made for our Lord a bed of roses
and lilies, and that it is impossible that this adorable Master will not
come, though he may delay, and take his delight with her."

This saint, in whom religion was genius, was one of Ulick's most
unqualified admirations. He never spoke of her that his voice did not
acquire an accent of conviction, or without alluding to the line of an
old English poet, who had addressed her:

'Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires.'

She recalled with a smile his contempt of the Austins and the Eliots,
those most materialistic writers, he would say, whose interest in
humanity and whose knowledge of it is limited to social habits and
customs. But St. Teresa he placed among the highest writers, among the
great visionaries. "Her desire sings," he said, "like the sea and the
winds, and it breaks like fire about God's feet." He had said that the
soul that flashed from her pages was more intense than any soul in
Shakespeare or Balzac. "They had created many, she but one incomparable
soul--her own, and in surging drift of vehement aspiration, and in
recession of temporal things we hear the singing of the stars, the
beating of the eternal pulse."

On Friday she had finished the autobiography, and before going into the
garden she took down another of the saint's works, _The Way of
Perfection_, intending to look through it in some sunny corner.

She had slipped easily into the early hours of the convent. After
breakfast she had the morning to herself, and she divided it between the
library and the garden. The leaves were beginning to fall, and in the
thinning branches there seemed to be an appearance of spring. From St.
Peter's walk she strolled into the orchard, and then into the piece of
uncultivated ground at the end of it. Some of the original furze bushes
remained, and among these a streamlet trickled through the long grasses,
and following it she found that it led her to the fish pond in the
shrubbery, at the back of St. Peter's walk. There was there a pleasant,
shady place, where she could sit and read. She stood for a moment
watching the fish. They were so tame that they would take the bread from
the novices' hands. She had brought som