He fell back a step in his amazement at having been so thoroughly
misunderstood. Then he drew away from the table. He looked at her as he
would speak, but checked on the thought. He turned, and so, without
another word, departed, and left us sitting there together.

It was then that we had our talk; or, rather, that she talked, whilst I sat
listening. And presently as I listened, I came gradually once more under
the spell of which I had more than once that day been on the point of
casting off the yoke.

For, after all, you are to discern in what I have written here, between
what were my feelings at the time and what are my criticisms of to-day in
the light of the riper knowledge to which I have come. The handling of a
sword had thrilled me strangely, as I have shown. Yet was I ready to
believe that such a thrill was but a lure of Satan's, as my mother assured
me. In deeper matters she might harbour error, as Fra Gervasio's irony had
shown me that he believed. But we went that night into no great depths.

She spent an hour or so in vague discourse upon the joys of Paradise, in
showing me the folly of jeopardizing them for the sake of the fleeting
vanities of this ephemeral world. She dealt at length upon the love of God
for us, and the love which we should bear to Him, and she read to me
passages from the book of the Blessed Varano and from Scupoli to add point
to her teachings upon the beauty and nobility of a life that is devoted to
God's service--the only service of this world in which nobility can exist.

And then she added little stories of martyrs who had suffered for the
faith, of the tortures to which they had been subjected, and of the
happiness they had felt in actual suffering, of the joy that their very
torments had brought them, borne up as they were by their faith and the