l spectres; while holy water sprinkled the uncanny,
dismal precincts of a circular room hollowed behind and beneath all
other apartments, the monumental, sacred Estufa.

At a signal from the monk who had escorted them, Mr. Dunbar lifted
Beryl from her saddle, and hand in hand they followed him across the
courtyard, mounted a flight of steps cut in the rock, and passed into a
low, dim room, where the ceiling was crossed in squares by heavy, red
cedar beams. The floor was paved with diamond-shaped slabs of purple
slate, the whitewashed wall adorned with colored lithographs of the
Passion; and above the cavernous chimney arch, where cedar logs blazed,
ran the inscription: "Otiositas inimica est animae."

Noiselessly as the wings of a huge bat, a leathern screen was folded
back from the corner of the room, and a venerable man advanced from the
gloom.

A fringe of white hair surrounded his head like a laurel chaplet in old
statues, and the heavy, straight brows that almost met across the nose,
hung as snowflakes over the intensely black eyes as glowing as lamps
set in the sockets of an ivory image. Scholarly and magnetic as
Abelard, with a certain innate proud poise of the head and shoulders,
that ill accorded with the Carlo-Borromeo expression of seraphic
serenity and meekness, set like a seal on the large square mouth, he
looked a veritable type of the ecclesiastical cenobites who, since the
days of Pachomius at Tabennae, have made their hearts altars of the
Triple Vows, and girdled the globe with a cable of scholastic
mysticism. The pale, shrunken hand he laid on the black serge that
covered his breast, was delicate as a woman's, and checkered with
knotted lines where the blood crept feebly.

Bowing low, he spoke in a carefully modulated voice, deep and resonant
as a bass viol:

"Welcome to such hospitality as our poverty permits. A cipher telegram
forwarded from the nearest station, sixty miles hence, prepared us to
expect a newly-married woman searching for a man, known to the secular
world as Robert Luke Brentano. You claim to be his nearest blood
relative?"

"I am his sister. How is he?"

"Alive, but sinking fast; sustained beyond all human calculation by the
hope of seeing you. You have not come one moment too soon. The man you
seek is only a lay brother here. The rules of our Order forbid the
admission of women to the cloister, but in articulo mortis! can I deny
him now the confession he wishes to offer you