he precious fluid. It was of the keen
cold green known to painters as viridian--the colour of turnip leaves
with the dew on them.

Don Baltasar drew a glass towards him across the table.

"I am no winebibber," he said, "my vows do not allow of it. But I will
give you a toast, which, if you permit me, I will drink with you in the
pure wine of the flint."

Rollo rose to his feet, and stood looking at the Prior out of his
steadfast blue eyes. They touched their glasses ceremoniously, the
elder, however, avoiding the gaze of the younger.

"May you be rewarded, not according to your successes, but according to
your deserts!" said Don Baltasar.

They drank, and Rollo, astonished by the strange bitter-sweet taste of
the _liqueur_, could only stammer, "I thank you, Prior. Indeed, you are
over kind to me. I only wish I had had--better news--better news to
bring you!"

And then, somehow, it appeared to the young man that a kind of waving
blackness in wreaths and coils like thick smoke began to invade the
room, bellying upwards from the floor and descending from the roof. He
seemed to be sinking back into the arms of the Father-Confessor Anselmo,
who grimaced at him through the empty eye-sockets and toothless jaws of
a skull. There were at least fifty abbots in the room, and a certain hue
of dusky red in the shadows of the window curtains first made him
shudder to the soul and then affected him with terror unutterable.
Finally chaos whirled down darkling and multitudinous, and Rollo knew no
more.

* * * * *

When the young man came to himself he was in altogether another place.
He lay flat on his back, with something hard under his head. His face
seemed cold and wet. The place, as his eyes wandered upward, was full of
shifting shadows and uncertain revealings of cobwebby roof-spaces filled
with machinery, huge wheels and pulleys, ropes and rings and hooks, on
all of which the blown light of candles flickered fitfully.

To one side he could dimly perceive the outlines of what seemed like a
great washerwoman's mangle. He remembered in Falkland town turning old
Betty Drouthy's for hours and hours, every moment expecting that Peggy
Ramsay would come in, basket on arm, the sweetest of Lady Bountifuls,
to visit that venerable humbug, who had all her life lived on too much
charity and who died at last of too much whiskey. Strange, was it not,
that he should think of those far-off days now?

His