th
their crape bonnets cocked awry and their draggled musty skirts to
Brother Aloysius himself shaken with excess of sin in colloquy with a
ghostly voice upon a late winter dawn.

"A ghost?" he echoed incredulously.

"It's true. I heard a voice telling me to go back. And when I went back,
there she was sitting in the arm-chair with the antimacassar round her
shoulders because it was cold, and the carving-knife across her knees,
waiting up to do for the fellow that was keeping her. I reckon it was
God sent me back to save her."

Even Michael in his vicious mood could not tolerate this hysterical
blasphemy, and he scoffed at the supernatural explanation. But Brother
Aloysius did not care whether he was believed or not. He himself was
sufficient audience to himself, ready to applaud and condemn with equal
exaggeration of feeling.

After a week of self-revelation Brother Aloysius suddenly had spiritual
qualms about his behaviour, and announced to Michael that he must go to
Confession and free himself from the oppressive responsibility of his
sin. Michael did not like the thought of Dom Cuthbert being aware of the
way in which his last days at the monastery had been spent, and hoped
that Brother Aloysius would confess in as general a manner as possible.
Yet even so he feared that the perspicacious Abbot would guess the
partner of his penitent, and, notwithstanding the sacred impersonality
of the Confessional, regard Michael with an involuntary disgust.
However, the confession, with all its attendant pangs of self-reproach,
passed over, and Michael was unable to detect the slightest alteration
in Dom Cuthbert's attitude towards him. But he avoided Brother Aloysius
so carefully during the remainder of his stay, that it was impossible to
test the Abbot's knowledge as directly as he could have wished.

The night before Michael was to leave the monastery, a great gale blew
from the south-west and kept him wide awake hour after hour until the
bell for Matins. He felt that on this his last night it would be in
order for him to attend the Office. So he dressed quickly and hurried
through the wind-swept corridor into the Chapel. Here, in a severity of
long droning psalms, he tried to purge his mind of all it had acquired
from the shamelessness of Brother Aloysius. He was so far successful
that he could look Dom Cuthbert fearlessly in the face when he bade him
good-bye next day, and as he coasted over the downs through the calm