who only see it through the clouds of earth, into that
keen icy stillness, where only favoured and long-trained souls can
breathe, up the piercing air of the slopes that lead to the Throne, and
there in the listening silence of heaven, where the voice of adoration
itself is silent through sheer intensity, where all colours return to
whiteness and all sounds to stillness, all forms to essence and all
creation to the Creator, there he let him fall in self-forgetting love
and wonder, breathe out his soul in one ardent all-containing act, and
make his choice.

CHAPTER XIV

EASTER DAY

Holy Week passed for Anthony like one of those strange dreams in which
the sleeper awakes to find tears on his face, and does not know whether
they are for joy or sorrow. At the end of the Retreat that closed on Palm
Sunday evening, Anthony had made his choice, and told Father Robert.

It was not the Exercises themselves that were the direct agent, any more
than were the books he had read: the books had cleared away intellectual
difficulties, and the Retreat moral obstacles, and left his soul desiring
the highest, keen to see it, and free to embrace it. The thought that he
would have to tell Isabel appeared to him of course painful and
difficult; but it was swallowed up in the joy of his conversion. He made
an arrangement with Father Robert to be received at Cuckfield on Easter
Eve; so that he might have an opportunity of telling Isabel before he
took the actual step. The priest told him he would give him a letter to
Mr. Barnes, so that he might be received immediately upon his arrival.

Holy Week, then, was occupied for Anthony in receiving instruction each
morning in the little oak parlour from Father Robert; and in attending
the devotions in the evening with the rest of the household. He also
heard mass each day.

It was impossible, of course, to carry out the special devotions of the
season with the splendour and elaboration that belonged to them; but
Anthony was greatly impressed by what he saw. The tender reverence with
which the Catholics loved to linger over the details of the Passion, and
to set them like precious jewels in magnificent liturgical settings, and
then to perform these stately heart-broken approaches to God with all the
dignity and solemnity possible, appealed to him in strong contrast to the
cold and loveless services, as he now thought them, of the