The guests of Hercules

								

trunks of the old beech trees. The novice was saying goodbye to the
convent garden, and the long straight path under the wall, where every
day for many years she had walked, spring and summer, autumn and winter;
days of rain, days of sun, days of boisterous wind, days of white
feathery snow--all the days through which she had passed, on her way
from childhood to womanhood. Best of all, she had loved the garden and
her favourite path in spring, when vague hopes like dreams stirred in
her blood, when it seemed that she could hear the whisper of the sap in
the veins of the trees, and the crisp stir of the buds as they unfolded.
She wished that she could have been going out of the garden in the
brightness and fragrance of spring. The young beauty of the world would
have been a good omen for the happiness of her new life. The sorrowful
incense of Nature in decay cast a spell of sadness over her, even of
fear, lest after all she were doing a wrong thing, making a mistake
which could never be amended.
The spirit of the past laid a hand upon her heart. Ghosts of sweet days
gone long ago beckoned her back to the land of vanished hours. The
garden was the garden of the past; for here, within the high walls
draped in flowering creepers and ivy old as history, past, present, and
future were all as one, and had been so for many a tranquil generation
of calm-faced, dark-veiled women. Suddenly a great homesickness fell
upon the novice like an iron weight. She longed to rush into the house,
to fling herself at Reverend Mother's feet, and cry out that she wanted
to take back her decision, that she wanted everything to be as it had
been before. But it was too late to change. What was done, was done.
Deliberately, she had given up her home, and all the kind women who had
made the place home for her, from the time when she was a child eight
years old until now, when she was twenty-four. Sixteen years! It was a
lifetime. Memories of her child-world before convent days were more like
dreams than memories of real things that had befallen her, Mary Grant.
And yet, on this her last day in the convent, recollections of the first
were crystal clear, as they never had been in the years that lay
between.
Her father had brought her a long way, in a train. Something dreadful
had happened, which had made him stop loving her. She could not guess
what, for she had done nothing wrong so far as she knew: but a few days
before, her nurse, a kind old woman of a comfortable fatness, had put
her into a room where her father was and gently shut the door, leaving
the two alone together. Mary had gone to him expecting a kiss, for he
was always kind, though she did not feel that she knew him well--only a
little better, perhaps, than the radiant young mother whom she seldom
saw for more than five minutes at a time. But instead of kissing her as
usual, he had turned upon her a look of dislike, almost of horror, which