He had tried solitude. On asking to be shut up in a cell, he had said to himself: “The thought of Glory is a temptation of my unquickened and unspiritual nature. It has already betrayed me into an act of cowardice and inhumanity, and it will drive me out into the world and fling me back again, as it drove out and flung back Brother Paul.” But the result of his solitude was specious and deceitful. As pictures seem to float before the eyes after the eyelids are closed, so his past life, now that it was over, seemed to rise up before him with awful distinctness. Sitting alone in his cell, every event of his life with Glory passed before him in review, and harassed him with pitiless condemnation. Why had he failed to realize the essential difference of temperament between himself and that joyous creature? Why had he hesitated to gratify her natural and innocent love of mere life? Why had he done this? Why had he not done that? If Glory were lost, if the wicked and merciless world had betrayed her, the fault was his, and God would surely punish him. Thus did solitude enervate his soul by frightening it, and the temptation he had hoped to vanquish became the more strong and tyrannical. He had tried reading. The Fathers told him that God allowed ascetics to keep the keys of their nature in their own hands; that they had only to think of woman as more bitter than death, and of her beauty as a cause of perdition, and that if any woman's face tormented them they were to picture it to the eye of the mind as old and wrinkled, defaced by disease, and even the prey of the worm. He tried to think of Glory as the Fathers directed, but when darkness fell and he lay on his bed, with the first dream of the night the strong powers of Nature that had no mind to surrender swept down the pitiful bulwarks of religion, and Glory was smiling upon him in her youth, her beauty, her sweetness, her humour, and all the grace of her countless gifts. He had tried fasting. Three times a day Brother Andrew brought him his food, and twice a day, when the lay brother had left him, he opened the window and spread the food on the sill for the birds to take. But the results of his fasting were the reverse of his expectations. At one moment he was uplifted by strong emotions, at the next moment he was in collapse. Visions began to pass before him. His father's face tormented him constantly, and sometimes he was conscious of the face of his mother, though he had never known her. But above all and through all there came the face of Glory. Fasting had only extended his dreams about her. He was dreaming both by day and by night now, and Glory was with him always.