Father Cyprian Hammond returned to his comfortable rooms in the north-west region one rainy autumn evening after a long day in the dreariest abodes of East London. He was almost worn out by the bodily fatigue of tramping those dismal streets with one of his friends and allies, a priest from the Cathedral at Moorfields; and by the mental strain that comes from facing the inscrutable problem of human suffering—the mystery of sorrow and pain, inevitable, unceasing, beyond man's power to help or cure.

He had visited the poor in great hospitals where every detail testified to the beneficence of the rich; yet he knew that the comfort and cleanliness of the hospital must needs accentuate the dirt and squalor of the slum to which the patient must return.

He sank into his armchair, with a sigh of relief, and was sorry to hear of a visitor, who had called twice that afternoon and would call again after nine o'clock.

"Did he leave his card?"

Yes, the card was there on the table.

"Mr. Claude Rutherford."

Father Cyprian had not seen Claude since the opening day of that inquest which had been so often adjourned, only to close in an open verdict, and a mystery still unsolved. He had not seen Claude; but he had seen Mrs. Rutherford more than once in that quiet month when life in West End London seems to come to a stand-still. She had talked about her son as she talked only to him, opening her heart to the friend who knew all its secrets, the best and the worst of her. Hitherto she had never failed to find him interested and sympathetic; but in those recent interviews it had seemed to her as if the close friend of long years had changed; as if he was talking to her from a distance; as if some mysterious barrier had arisen between them.

She had told him of that conversation with her son, in which he had promised to confide in this old and trusted friend. That had happened more than a month ago, and the confidence had not yet come. Perhaps it was coming to-night.

"I will see Mr. Rutherford at whatever time he calls," Father Cyprian told his servant.

His dinner was short and temperate, but not ill-cooked or ill-served. He drank barley water, but the jug that held it was of old cut-glass, picked up at a broker's shop in a back street for seven shillings, and worth as many pounds. His silver was old family plate, his napery of the finest.

It was past nine when Claude Rutherford appeared, and the first thing Father Cyprian observed was that he was physically exhausted. He dropped into a chair with a long sigh of fatigue, and it was three or four minutes before he was able to speak.

"I knew you would have finished your Spartan dinner by this time," he said, "but I hope I am not spoiling your evening."

"You ought to know that I have nothing better to do with my evening than to talk with anybody who wants me," answered the priest in the low, grave voice that was like the sound of Hollmann's bow in an adagio passage, "and I think you must want me, or you would not come to this house a third time. What have you been doing since six o'clock? You look horribly fagged."

"I have been to Hampstead. It is a fine night, and I wanted a walk."

"You have walked too far. You are ill, Claude."

"A little under the weather. The modern complaint, neuritis, and its concomitant, insomnia."

"You ought to go to one of my neighbours in Harley Street."

"No. I want you—the physician of souls. This corporal frame of mine will mend itself when I get out of London; a thousand miles or so. Do you remember the night we walked home together from Portland Place? You pressed me very hard that evening. You tried to bring me back to the fold—but the time had not come."

"And now the time has come?" questioned the priest, pushing aside the book that he had been reading, and bending forward to look into a page of human life, bringing his searching eyes nearer to the haggard face in front of him.

"Yes, the time has come."

"What is the matter?"

"Oh, only the old disease—in a more acute phase. The disgust of life—satiety, weariness of the world outside me, loathing of the world inside; the old disease in a virulent form. I want you to help me to the cure. It must be heroic treatment. Half measures will be no use. I want you to help me to enter one of the orders that mean death to the world. Dominicans, Benedictines, La Trappe, anything you like; the harder the rule the better it may be for my soul."

"This is strangely sudden."

"Perhaps it is an inspiration. But no, my dear friend, it is not sudden. The complaint is chronic, and has been growing upon me for the last ten years, ever since I found that I was a failure. That discovery is a crisis in a man's life. He looks inside himself one day, and finds that the fire has gone out. It must all come to that. Life, mind, heart, all are contained in that central fire which is the soul of a man. While the fire burns he has hope, he has ambitions, he has a future; when the fire goes out, he has nothing but the past; the memory of things that were sweet and things that were bitter; nothing but memory to live upon in all the years that are to come: and he may live to be ninety, a haunted man! I have done with the world, Father Cyprian. Am I to walk about like a dead man for ten or twenty or thirty years? I have done with the world. I want to give the rest of my life to the God you and my mother believe in."

"You would not want to do that if you were not a believer."

"I was reared in the true faith. Yes, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief."

"I will help you with all my heart; but I do not think you are of the stuff that Benedictine monks are made of; and it is a foolish thing to put your hand to the plough, unless you have the force of mind to finish your furrow."

"I will finish my furrow."

"And break your mother's heart, perhaps. Your love is all she has in this life, except her religion."

"Her religion is no less a force than her love. My neglect of my duties has been a grief to her. She has never ceased to remonstrate with me, to remind me of my boyish ardour, my days of implicit faith."

"She wants to see you return to the faith, and the obedience, of those days; but it would distress her if you took a step that would mean separation from her."

"That would be inconsistent, after all her sermons."

"Women are apt to be inconsistent—even the best of them."

"In any case, even if my mother should object, which I think unlikely, I have made up my mind. I had time to commune with my soul in that three hours' walk through the darkness. I came to you this night fully resolved not to ask your advice as to the step, but your help in taking it. Where can I go? To whom can I submit myself?"

"Frankly, Claude, I am too much in the dark to help you. Come to me at my church to-morrow morning after mass, with your mind more at rest, and make your confession. Let me see into the bottom of your heart. I cannot talk to a man behind a mask. I can say nothing till I know all."

"No, I cannot do that. I must have time. I want solitude and a cell. I want to shake off the husk of the world I have lived in too long. I want to be done with earthly desires. I shall have a new mind when I am in my woollen gown."

"Alas, Claude, I doubt, I doubt. Do you remember all we talked about when you were last in this room—a long time ago?"

"Yes, I remember."

"You remember how I tried to awaken you to the danger of your relations with Mario Provana's wife."

"Those are things a man does not forget."

"You denied the danger; but you did not deny your love. You gave me your assurance, not as to a priest, but between man and man, that no evil should ever come of that love."

"Yes, I remember. I was not afraid of myself. I belong to the great army of triflers and dilettanti—I am not of the stuff that passionate lovers are made of."

"But now Death has intervened, and the situation is changed. Two years hence you might marry your cousin without shame to either, without disrespect to the dead. Are you capable of renouncing that hope by burying yourself in a cloister? Are you equal to the sacrifice? Would there be no looking back, no repentance?"

"I shall never marry my cousin Vera."

"Because she does not love you? Is that the reason?"

"No need to enter into details, or to count the cost. I have made up my mind. For once in my life I have a purpose and a will."

"You seem in earnest."

The words came slowly, like a spoken doubt, and the priest's searching eyes were on the pale face in front of him. The countenance where the refinement of race—a long line of well-born men and women, showed in every lineament.

"This sudden resolve of yours is inexplicable," the priest continued in a troubled voice, after a silence that seemed long. "It is not in your temperament or your manner of life, since you came into a man's inheritance, to cut yourself off from all that makes life pleasant to a young man with talent, attractiveness, and independence. I would give much to know your reason for such a step."

"Haven't I told you, my dear friend? Welt Schmerz. Isn't that enough?"

"No, it is not enough. Welt Schmerz is the chronic disease of a decadent age. If every sufferer from Welt Schmerz were to turn monk, this world would be a monastery. It is a phase in every man's life—or a pose. I know it is not that with you. There is something behind, Claude—something at the back of your mind. Something that you must tell me, before I can be of any real help to you. But you are your mother's son, and were you steeped in sin, I would do my uttermost to help you. Come to me the day after to-morrow. I shall have had time to think over your case, and you will be in a better mood for considering the situation: to surrender this worldly life and all it holds is not a light thing that a man should do in a fit of the blues, a man still on the sunward side of forty. I, who have entered my seventh decade, have no yearnings for a woollen gown."

"I have made up my mind," Claude repeated, in a dull, dead voice, the voice of an obstinate man. "Good night."