can tell me everything."

"Reverend Mother, if you did not pass from the schoolroom to the convent
like Veronica, you will have heard, you must know, that the life of an
opera singer is generally a sinful life. I was very young at the time,
only one-and-twenty. I knew that I had a beautiful voice, and that my
father could not teach me to sing. But it was not for self-interest that
I left him; I was genuinely in love with Sir Owen Asher. He was very
good to me; he wanted to marry me; from the world's point of view I was
very successful, but I was never happy. I felt that I was living a
sinful life, and we cannot go on doing what we feel to be wrong and
still be happy. Night after night I could not sleep. My conscience kept
me awake. I strove against the inevitable, for it is very difficult to
change one's life from end to end, but there was no help for it."

Her story, as she told it, seemed to her very wonderful, more wonderful
than she had thought it was, and she would have liked to have told the
Reverend Mother all the torment and anguish of mind she had gone
through. But she felt that she was on very thin ice, and trembled
inwardly lest she was shocking the nun.

It was exciting to tell that it was her visit to the convent that had
brought about her repentance; how that very night her eyes had opened at
dawn, and she had seen clearly the wickedness of her life, and she could
not refrain from saying that it was Owen Asher's last letter, in which
he said that at all hazards he would save her from losing herself in
religion, that had sent her to Monsignor for advice. She noticed her
omission of all mention of Ulick, and it seemed to her strange that she
could still be interested in her sins, and at the same time genuinely
determined to reform her life. The nun sat looking at her, thinking what
answer she should make, and Evelyn wondered what that answer would be.

"We shall pray for you.... You will not fall into sin again; it is our
prayers that enable men to overcome their passions. Were it not for our
prayers, God would have long ago destroyed the world. Think of the times
of persecution and sacrilege, when prayer only survived in the
monasteries."

Evelyn could not but acquiesce: a world without prayer would be an
intolerable world, as unendurable to man as to God. But if the Reverend
Mother's explanation were a true one! If these poor forsakers of the
world were in truth the saviours of the world, without whose