"My doubts grew until they broke of their own weight. One day, soon after my poor father died, I had been bitterly recalling what seemed to be the cruelest fact of all--the fact that, for four years before I saw your face, I had lived in the supernatural persuasion that you were my destiny and that your life needed mine. Suddenly it flashed upon me that a man and a woman may be predestined to commingle their lives on some basis other than conventional love and marriage. I knew that my love for you was not such love as I saw among the lovers and the married people around me; and that from ordinary marriage I had always recoiled. "It was on the strand of a beautiful English bay, with white cliffs running out miles into the blue water, that I worked out this new thought to the logical end. It was the eighth of July. At about eleven in the morning I held the key in my hand. Antonio, I did not love you less; but my new faith rushed back a million fold and I loved God so much more that at last I saw my love for you in its true light. I saw it as the means to an end. I saw that you had been sent to me, as Saint Philip was sent to the treasurer of Queen Candace, to make me a Christian. You, a monk, were raised up to make me a nun. "I saw much more. I saw that, for years and years, I had been fighting for happy human relationships. I, for whom God's love had reserved this richer bliss, had cried out, year after year, for a father, a mother, a sister, a brother, a friend. My bitterest cry, Antonio, had been for you; but God knows that I had cried out for you less as a husband than as a comrade and a most dear friend. On that July morning I saw why our Lord had refused me the lower good to grant me the higher, and how He had sorely wounded me that His balm might more sweetly heal me." Isabel ceased. Her long speech had been growing less and less easy until she could not utter another word. The nun thought that the cause was in herself. Why had she not confined herself to reciting the precise words with which she had come prepared? Or why had she not taken the still better course of throwing all her preparation to the winds and of pouring out her heart to Antonio in whatever words might come? Why had she muddled fragments of a set speech with a nervous impromptu?