That night, and during the greater part of the following day, I felt,
without quite knowing why, as if I were living under the dark cloud of a
gathering thunderstorm. All my fear of the world, and my desire to
escape from it, had fallen upon me afresh. Hence it was not altogether
by the blind leading of fate that half an hour before Ave Maria I
entered the church of the Convent which the Reverend Mother had given me
the name of.
The church was empty when I pushed past the leather hanging that covered
the door, but the sacristan was lighting the candles for Benediction, so
I went up to the bronze screen, the Cancello, that divides the public
part from the part occupied by the Sisters, and knelt on the nearest
step.
After a while the church-bell rang overhead, and then (the congregation
having gathered in the meantime) the nuns came in by way of a corridor
which seemed to issue out of the darkness from under a figure of the
Virgin and Child.
They were all in white, snow-white from head to foot, with a glimmer of
blue scapular beneath their outer garment, and they wore long thick
veils which entirely concealed their features when they entered but were
raised when they reached their seats and faced the altar.
Familiar as I was with similar scenes this one moved me as I had never
before been moved--the silent white figures, with hands clasped on their
breasts, coming in one by one with noiseless and unhurried footsteps,
like a line of wraiths from another world.
But a still deeper emotion was to come to me.
As the last of the nuns entered, the Superior as I knew she would be, I
recognised her instantly. It was my own Reverend Mother herself; and
when, after kneeling to the altar, she came down to her seat nearest to
the screen, immediately in front of the place where I knelt, I knew by
the tremor of the clasped hands which held the rosary, that she had seen
and recognised me.