I trembled and my heart thumped against my breast.
Then the priest entered and the Litany began. It was sung throughout. Almost the whole of the service was sung. Never had Benediction seemed so beautiful, so pathetic, so appealing, so irresistible.
By the time the _Tantum ergo_ had been reached and the sweet female voices, over the soft swell of the organ, were rising to the vaulted roof in sorrowful reparation for the sins of all sinners in the world who did not pray for themselves, the religious life was calling to me as it had never called before.
"Come away from the world," it seemed to say. "Obedience to your heavenly Father cancels all duty to your earthly one. Leave everything you fear behind you, and find peace and light and love."
The service was over, the nuns had dropped their veils and gone out as slowly and noiselessly as they had come in (the last of them with her head down): the sacristan with his long rod was extinguishing the candles on the altar; the church was growing dark and a lay-sister in black was rattling a bunch of keys at the door behind me before I moved from my place beside the rails.
Then I awoke as from a dream, and looking longingly back at the dark corridor down which the nuns had disappeared, I was turning to go when I became aware that a young man was standing beside me and smiling into my face.
"Mally," he said very softly, and he held out his hand.
Something in the voice made me giddy, something in the blue eyes made me tremble. I looked at him but did not speak.
I felt as if a rosy veil were falling over my face and neck. A flood of joy was sweeping through me. At last I knew who it was.
It was Martin Conrad, grown to be a man, a tall, powerful, manly man, but with the same face still--an elusive ghost of the boy's face I used to look up to and love.
A few minutes later we were out on the piazza in front of the church, and with a nervous rush of joyous words he was telling me what had brought him to Rome.
Having just "scraped through" his examinations, and taken his degree--couldn't have done so if the examiners had not been "jolly good" to him--he had heard that Lieut. . . .--was going down to the great ice barrier that bounds the South Pole, to investigate the sources of winds and tides, so he had offered himself as doctor to the expedition and been accepted.