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.
I trembled and my heart thumped against my breast.
Then the priest entered and the Litany began. It was sung throughout. Almost the whole of the service was sung. Never had Benediction seemed so beautiful, so pathetic, so appealing, so irresistible.
By the time the Tantum ergo had been reached and the sweet female voices, over the soft swell of the organ, were rising to the vaulted roof in sorrowful reparation for the sins of all sinners in the world who did not pray for themselves, the religious life was calling to me as it had never called before.
"Come away from the world," it seemed to say. "Obedience to your heavenly Father cancels all duty to your earthly one. Leave everything you fear behind you, and find peace and light and love."