time, but far away, perched up in a leafy
nook among them was a little cluster of old grey buildings; just a
chapel, a guest-house, a refectory, and half a dozen cells forming a
tiny quadrangle which was still called St. Mary's Chapel of Ease, but
which in the old days when all the lands that Enid could see from her
roof-walk had belonged to the ancient Abbey of Ganthony--of which her
husband's name was perhaps a corruption--had been known as the House of
Our Lady of Rest.

Before the dissolution of the Monasteries it had been a place of rest
and retreat for servants of the Church who had exhausted themselves in
her service or had found reason to withdraw themselves a while from the
world and its temptations; and such, though creeds have changed, it has
practically remained until now.

The little church was nominally St. Augustine's, the Parish Church of a
little scattered hamlet which was sprinkled over the hillside beneath
it. The living had been in the gift of the Garthorne family, but Sir
Reginald's father had sold the advowson to one of the earliest pioneers
of the High Church movement in England, and through this purchase it had
passed into the keeping of a small Anglican Order calling itself the
Fraternity of St. Augustine.

This little Brotherhood had not only maintained the traditions of the
ancient Order of St. Augustine, Preacher, Saint and Martyr, but had done
all that was possible to revive them in their ancient purity. The little
monastery among the hills, though it had passed under another
ecclesiastical rule, was still a place where priests and deacons might
come either to rest from the labours which they had endured in the
service of their Master, or to separate themselves from the din and
turmoil of the world, and, amidst the peace and silence of nature,
wrestle with the doubts or temptations that had beset them. The Vicar of
the parish and Father Superior of the Retreat was an aged priest who had
welcomed three generations of his younger brothers in Christ as
temporary sojourners in this little sanctuary, and had sent them away
comforted and strengthened to take their place again in the ranks of the
army which wages that battle which began when the first prophecy was
uttered in Eden, and which will only end when the sound of the Last
Trump marshalls the hosts of men before the bar of the Last Tribunal.

Vane had been the occupant of one of the tiny little rooms, which had
once been the monks' cel