ward also, and that
religion had deprived him of his will, of his manhood, and enervated his
soul itself.

Brother Paul was moving about in the adjoining cell. The lay brother had
become very weak; his step was slow, his feet dragged along the floor;
his breath was audible and sometimes his cough was long and raucous. John
had heard these sounds every day and had tried not to listen, but now he
strained his ears to hear. A new thought had come to him: he would ask to
be allowed to nurse Brother Paul; that should be his work, for work alone
could save him.

Next morning he leaped up from sleep at the first syllable of
"Benedicamus Domino," and cried, "Father!" But when the door opened in
answer to his call it was the Father Minister who entered. The Superior
had gone to give a Retreat to a sisterhood in York, and would be absent
until the end of Lent. John looked at the hard face of the deputy, the
very mirror of its closed and frozen soul, and he could say nothing.

"Is it anything that I can do for you?" said the Father Minister.

"No--that is to say--no, no," said John.

When he opened his window that day he could hear the Lenten services in
the church. The prayers, the responses, the psalms, and the hymns woke to
fresh life the memory of things long past, and for the first time he
became oppressed with a great loneliness. The near neighbourhood of
Brother Paul intensified that loneliness, and at length he asked for an
indulgence and spoke to the Father Minister again.

"Brother Paul is ill; let me attend to him," he said.

The Father Minister shook his head. "The brother gets all he wants. He
does not wish for constant attendance."

"But he is a dying man, and somebody should be with him always."

"The doctor says nothing can be done for him. He may live months. But if
he is dying, let us leave him to meditate on the happiness and glory of
another world."

John made no further struggle. Another door had closed on him. But it was
not necessary to go to Brother Paul that he might be with him always. The
spiritual eye could see everything. Listening to the sounds in the
adjoining cell, it was the same at length as if the wall between them had
fallen down and the two rooms were one. Whatever Brother Paul did John
seemed to see, whatever he said in his hours of pain John seemed to hear,
and when he lifted his scuttle of coal from the place at the door where
the lay brother left it, John's hand seemed to bear up