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By Root 822 0

structure, offers no home to those unhappy souls. Work, as it now is, the Abbess argued with a kind of realism which surprised Michael at the time, can rarely offer satisfaction to the half-contemplative. A few professions, such as teaching or nursing, remain such that they can readily be invested with a spiritual significance. But although it is possible, and indeed demanded of us, that all and any occupation be given a sacramental meaning, this is now for the majority of people almost intolerably difficult; and for some of such people, 'disturbed and hunted by God', as she put it, who cannot find a work which satisfies them in the ordinary world, a life half retired, and a work made simple and significant by its dedicated setting, is what is needed. Our duty, the Abbess said, is not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life as it in fact is, but to seek that place, that task, those people, which will make our spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish; and in this search, said the Abbess, we must make use of a divine cunning. 'As wise as serpents, as harmless as doves.'

Michael, who recognized spiritual authority when he saw it, listened eagerly to the Abbess, coming back day after day to the parlour to sit, his chair tilting forwards, his hands gripping the bars of the grille, to look upon that old pale face, ivory-coloured under the shadow of the white cowl, worn by long-forgotten sacrifices and illuminated by joys of which Michael had no conception. It was an aspect of Michael's belief in God, and one which although he knew it to be dangerous he could never altogether reject, that he expected the emergence in his life of patterns and signs. He had always felt himself to be a man with a definite destiny, a man waiting for a call. His disappointment concerning the priesthood had been the more intense. Now when the Abbess spoke to him in terms which, without any confession on his part, seemed so accurate a diagnosis of his own condition, he took her words immediately as a command. Michael knew the futility of his recent years, eaten by an ennui which he had tried to picture to himself as an insatiable thirst for the good. But now the pattern was at last emerging, the call had come.

Michael was made a little sad by the fact that once the plan had been decided on and the arrangements set in train the Abbess ceased to see him. She had never asked him about his past, and through all the excitement of the new project Michael had been waiting for the moment when he could give to her that full account, which he had never yet offered to another human being, of his so far unprofitable and disorderly life. He had reason to believe that the Abbess knew from other sources the salient facts. But it would have eased his heart to have told her everything himself. Yet out of some inscrutable wisdom the Abbess did not ask for the confession which he was so anxious to make, and after a while Michael wryly accepted his enforced silence as something to be offered quietly and as a sacrifice since it was the will of that remarkable lady who certainly knew his desire to tell as well as she doubtless knew all that he had to tell, and more. Since the community had actually been in existence Michael had seen the Abbess only three times, summoned on each occasion by her to discuss matters of policy. All other details which concerned the Abbey had been dealt with in discussion with Mother Clare, or through the intermediary offices of Sister Ursula.

The idea of the market-garden had arisen naturally enough. There was good land surrounding the Court, and the working of it would be the proper and primary activity of the inhabitants of the house. The garden could be begun on a small scale, and grow with the membership of the community. Other types of work could possibly be introduced later. At present it was impossible to foresee the pattern things would take, and undesirable to attempt to plan more than a little way ahead. The nucleus of the community had been Michael himself and Peter Topglass. Peter