cessation, people breathed blessings on them wherever they
appeared, and Raymond felt that his work for the Lord in the midst of
His stricken people had indeed begun.

CHAPTER XIX. THE STRICKEN SORCERER.

"Thou to Guildford then, my son, and I and the Brethren to London."

So said Father Paul some three weeks later, as he stood once again
inside the precincts of the Monastery, with Raymond by his side, looking
round the thinned circle of faces of such of the Brothers as had
survived the terrible visitation which had passed over them, and now
gone, as it seemed, elsewhere. Quite one-half of the inhabitants of that
small retreat had fallen victims to the scourge. Scarce ten souls out of
all those who had sought shelter within those walls had risen from their
beds and gone forth to their desolated homes again. The great trench in
the burying ground had received the rest; and of the Brothers who
gathered round Father Paul to welcome him back, several showed, by their
pinched and stricken appearance, how near they themselves had been to
the gates of death.

Few stricken by the fatal sickness itself ever recovered; but there were
many others who, falling ill of overwork or some other feverish ailment,
were accounted to have caught the distemper, and many of these did
amend, though all sickness at such a time seemed to get a firmer hold
upon its victims. But Father Paul and both his young assistants had
escaped unscathed, though they had been waging a hand-to-hand fight with
the destroyer for three long weeks, that seemed years in the retrospect.

The Brothers came crowding round them as about those returned from the
grave. Indeed, to them it did almost seem as though this was a
resurrection from the dead; for they had long since given up all hope of
seeing their beloved Superior and Father again in the flesh.

But the Father himself only accounted his work begun. Although the
pestilence appeared to have passed from the immediate district, and such
cases as occurred amid the few survivors of the visitation were by no
means so fatal as they had been in the beginning, yet the sickness
itself in its most virulent form was sweeping along northward and
eastward, spreading death and desolation in its track; and Father Paul
had but one purpose in his mind, which was to follow in the path of the
destroyer, performing for the sufferers wherever he went the same
offices of piety and mercy that he had been wont to undertak