"This is the school of the abbey. The road passes just below. I was standing at the window when your horse ran past, and I brought you here." "I must go home at once. They will be anxious about me. I am visiting at a place not more than a mile away." He shook his head and pointed to the window. A sudden gray blur of rain had effaced the landscape. The wind shook the building. "You must remain here until the storm is over. It will last but a little while." During this conversation she had been sitting on the white cowl, and he, with the frankness of a wondering, innocent child, had been kneeling quite close beside her. Now she got up and walked to one of the windows, looking out upon the storm, while he retired to another window at the opposite end of the room. What was the tempest-swept hill outside to the wild, swift play of emotions in him? A complete revulsion of feeling quickly succeeded his first mood. What if she was more beautiful--far more beautiful--than the sweet Virgin's picture in the abbey? She was a devil, a beautiful devil. Her eyes, her hair, which had blown against his face and around his neck, were the Devil's implements; her form, which he had clasped in his arms, was the Devil's subtlest hiding-place. She had brought sin into the world. She had been the curse of man ever since. She had tempted St. Anthony. She had ruined many a saint, sent many a soul to purgatory, many a soul to bell. Perhaps she was trying to send _his_ soul to hell now--now while he was alone with her and under her influence. It was this same woman who had broken into the peace of his life two weeks before, for he had instantly recognized the voice as the one that he had heard in the garden and that had been the cause of his severe penance. Amid all his scourgings, fasts, and prayers that voice had never left him. It made him ache to think of what penance he must now do again on her account; and with a sudden impulse he walked across the room, and, standing before her with arms folded across his breast, said in a voice of the simplest sorrow: "Why have you crossed my path-way, thus to tempt me?" She looked at him with eyes that were calm but full of natural surprise. "I do not understand how I have tempted you." "You tempt me to believe that woman is not the devil she is." She was silent with confusion. The whole train of his thought was unknown to her. It was difficult, bewildering. A trivial answer was out of the question, for he hung upon her expected reply with a look of pitiable eagerness. She took refuge in the didactic. "I have nothing to say about the nature of woman. It is vague, contradictory; it is anything, everything. But I _can_ speak to you of the lives of women; that is a definite subject. Some women may be what you call devils. But some are not. I thought that you recognized the existence of saintly women within the memories and the present pale of your church." "True. It is the women of the world who are the devils."