But they were still on the road of Damascus. On the way home, they rested at the house of a friend near the Monastery of Mount Melleray. I cannot be quite sure whether the monks were giving a retreat for seculars in the monastery, or whether it was being preached in the neighboring town. As well as I remember, it was the latter. Indeed, I doubt whether women would be admitted to assist at a retreat within the monastery, and, if not, this would be conclusive. But of one thing I am sure, the preacher was Father Paul, the superior of La Trappe. I don't know whether his eloquence, judged by the standard of human rhetoric, was anything very remarkable, but many witnesses go to prove on exhaustive evidence that it was of that kind whose property it is to save souls. To Mary it came like a summons straight from heaven. She felt an imperative desire to speak to him at once in the confessional. "I can give you no idea of the exquisite sense of peace and security that came over me the moment I knelt down at his feet," she said, in relating to me this stage of her vocation. "I felt certain that I had found the man who was to be my Father Faber." And so she had. All that passes between a director and his spiritual child is of so solemn and sacred a nature that, although many things which Mary confided to me concerning her intercourse with the saintly abbot of La Trappe might prove instructive and would certainly prove edifying to many interior souls, I do not feel justified in repeating them. If I were even not held back by this fear of indiscretion, I should shrink from relating these confidences, lest I should mar the beauty or convey a false interpretation of their meaning. While she was speaking, I understood her perfectly. While listening to the wonderful experiences of divine grace with what she had been favored, and which she recounted to me with the confiding simplicity of a child, her words were as clear and reflected her thoughts as luminously as a lake reflects the stars looking down into its crystal depths, making the mirror below a faithful repetition of the sky above. But when I tried to write down what she had said while it was quite fresh upon my mind, the effort baffled me. There was so little to write, and that little was so delicate, so mysteriously intangible, I seemed never to find the right word that had come so naturally, so expressively, to her. When she spoke of prayer especially, there was an eloquence, rising almost to sublimity, in her language that altogether defied my coarse translation, and seemed to dissolve like a rainbow under the process of dissection. The most elevated subjects she was at home with as if they had been her natural theme, the highest spirituality her natural element. The writings of St. Teresa and St. Bernard had grown familiar to her as her catechism, and she seemed to have caught the note of their inspired teaching with the mastery of sainthood. This was the more