Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: admission that others had been in the room. But it did seem as if these nuns had intervened. He exclaimed against the folly of his thoughts, and wandered on. He eventually turned into a club in hopes of finding Harding. chapter{Section 4n Mebat had come downstairs to tell her mistress that a pair of stockings were missing. But Evelyn did not answer her, and she hoped the footman would not bring the lamp yet. " You must have left them at your father's. If you will write to-night . . ." " No, Herat, I did not leave them at my father's. I left them at the convent." She wished her maid to know that her relations with Sir Owen would be different from thenceforth, and it seemed to her that a mention of the convent would be sufficient for the moment. Better the truth than ugly rumours that Owen had left her for another woman, or that she had left him for another man. She wished Herat would leave her, but Merat was much interested in her mistress's visit to the convent; and Evelyn was surprised to find that her maid's ideas regarding a vocation were more simple and explicit than her own. " There are those," she said, " who slip away from life when they are very young, before life has fairly caught them, and those who have had a disappointment, and feel there is nothing else for them." " But you, miss, you could never live their life; you are too old, or not old enough." And when Herat left her, Evelyn considered how she had discovered two instincts in herself, an inveterate sensuality and a sincere aspiration for a spiritual life. Which would survive ? As she sat over the fire pondering, there came to her what seemed like a third revelation—that the sexual trouble was but the surface of her nature, that beyond it there was a deeper nature whose depths were yet unsound...