“‘It is time for me to go,’ I said. ‘Are you coming to the chapel?’
“‘Yes,’ he answered almost eagerly. ‘I shall look down on you from my lonely gallery. Perhaps I shall be able to feel the life of prayer.’
“‘May it be so,’ I said.
“But I think I spoke without confidence, and I know that that evening I prayed without impulse, coldly, mechanically. The long, dim chapel, with its lines of monks facing each other in their stalls, seemed to me a sad place, like a valley of dry bones—for the first time, for the first time.
“I ought to have gone on the morrow to the Reverend Pere. I ought to have asked him, begged him to remove me from the hotellerie. I ought to have foreseen what was coming—that this man had a strength to live greater than my strength to pray; that his strength might overcome mine. I began to sin that night. Curiosity was alive in me, curiosity about the life that I had never known, was—so I believed, so I thought I knew—never to know.
“When I came out of the chapel into the hotellerie I met our guest—I do not say his name. What would be the use?—in the corridor. It was almost dark. There were ten minutes before the time for locking up the door and going to bed. Francois, the servant, was asleep under the arcade.
“‘Shall we go on to the path and have a last breath of air?’ the stranger said.
“We stepped out and walked slowly up and down.
“‘Do you not feel the beauty of peace?’ I asked.
“I wanted him to say yes. I wanted him to tell me that peace, tranquillity, were beautiful. He did not reply for a moment. I heard him sigh heavily.