After that I told her of all I had passed through since as a result of my love for Martin—­how I had parted from him when he went down to the Antarctic; how I had waited for him in London; how I had sacrificed family and friends and home, and taken up poverty and loneliness and hard work for him; how I had fallen into fathomless depths of despair when I thought I had lost him; and how joy and happiness had returned only when God, in His gracious goodness, had given him back.

“No, no, no”, I cried.  “My love for Martin can never be overcome or forgotten—­never as long as I live in the world!”

“Then,” said the Reverend Mother (she had been listening intently with her great eyes fixed on my hot and tingling face), “then,” she said, in her grave and solemn voice, “If that is the case, my child, there is only one thing for you to do—­to leave it.”

“Leave it?”

“Leave the world, I mean.  Return with me to Rome and enter the convent.”

It would be impossible to say how this affected me—­how it shook me to the heart’s core—­how, in spite of my efforts to act on my darling’s warning, it seemed to penetrate to the inmost part of my being and to waken some slumbering instinct in my soul.

For a long time I sat without speaking again, only listening with a fluttering heart to what the Reverend Mother was saying—­that it was one of the objects of the religious life to offer refuge to the tortured soul that could not trust itself to resist temptation; and that taking my vows as a nun to God would be the only way (known to and acknowledged by the Church) of cancelling my vows as a wife to my husband.

“You will be a bride still, my child, but a bride of Christ.  And isn’t that better—­far better?  You used to wish to be a nun, you know, and if your father had not come for you on that most unhappy errand you might have been one of ourselves already.  Think of it, my child.  The Mothers of our convent will be glad to welcome you, if you can come as a willing and contented Sister.  And how can I leave you here, at the peril of your soul, my daughter?”

I was deeply moved, but I made one more effort.

I told the Reverend Mother that, since the days when I had wished to be a nun, a great change had come over me.  I had become a woman, with all a woman’s passions—­the hunger and thirst for love, human love, the love of the good man who loved me with all his soul and strength.  Therefore I could never be a willing and contented Sister.  I should only break the peace and harmony of their house.  And though she were to put me down in the lowest cell of her convent, my love would follow me there; it would interrupt my offices, it would clamour through my prayers, and I should always be unhappy—­miserably unhappy.