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Then she sprang from the prow of the balsa to the shore, followed by her two maidens, who dragged it further up the beach, and went forward to talk with certain white-robed men in the crowd. For a long while she talked, turning now and again to point at me. At length these men, accompanied by a number of others, ran forward.
The earth at my feet was rife with creeping plants and many-colored flowers, the sky overhead was half hid by motionless pines. Suddenly, whether crawling out from the herbage or dropping down from the trees, by my side stood the white-robed and skeleton form Ayesha's attendant the Strangler. I sprang from him shuddering, then halted and faced him.
Next comes the kwan or coffin, borne palanquin-wise upon the shoulders of men of that pariah caste whose office it is to dig graves and assist at funerals. Lastly come the women mourners. They are all white-hooded and white-robed from head to feet, like phantoms.
"With your permission," she returned, softly, "I will go to the convent where I was educated. The dear nuns would be so glad to see me and I am sure you will not object? It will be a good preparation for my future." I seized her caressing hands and held them hard, while I looked upon her kneeling there like the white-robed figure of a praying saint. "It will indeed!" I said in a harsh voice.
A white-robed, hooded figure, some man in a bathing wrap, absurdly suggestive of an Arab in his burnous, came out from one of the nearer bungalows, and stood clear and still and shadowless in the glare. He put his hands to shade his seaward eyes, and shouted to people within. The people within MY people! My fingers tightened on my revolver. What was this war nonsense to me?
He ventured the one swift glimpse at her a slender, white-robed figure, one among a group of both men and women before an open door, through which the light streamed heard her ask, "Who are they? What cavalry troop is that?" caught the response in a man's voice, "'M' of the Seventh, from Fort Union," and then passed by, his eyes looking straight ahead, his hand gripping his horse's bit.
The sweet voices of the white-robed boys rising along the vaulted roof of the old church melted the hearts of those who, with excuses for their curiosity to their neighbours, ventured to go and hear them. The vicar had a natural talent, almost a genius, for music. There was a long struggle in his mind whether he might or might not permit himself an organ in his library.
It was a remarkable experience, hearing one who had passed along the prison path for forty years declare “There is no prison but the prison self;” and it drove conviction to one’s mind as this white-robed messenger from the East pointed the way out,—not by the path called “Renunciation,” but “Unattachment;” Radiant Acquiescence—the Shining Pathway out of the “greater prison of self” as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá so beautifully terms those bars that keep us from our fulfillment.
It is now rebuilt on modern lines and not much of the original structure remains upright. I wandered about the precincts in the company of two white-robed French monks, endeavouring to reconstruct not the convent as it was in its younger days, but them. That older one, especially he had known the world. . . .
But it was not a party such as Milly had been promised; with the small drawing-room turned into a cave of delights, where a real, white-robed fairy with silver wings and a wand presided over presents to be given to Milly and all her little guests. The promise, in the pleasurable excitement of the Walshs' arrival, had been forgotten by all but Milly.
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