ark, who had supposed that Lady Landells had regarded him with aversion
and scorn, stared at this.

"Didn't she give you her hand when you said good-bye?" asked Sir
Charles.

"Her left hand," said Mark.

"Oh, she never gives her right hand to anybody. She has some fad about
spoiling the magnetic current of Apollo or something. Now, what about a
walk?"

Mark said he should like to go for a walk very much, but wasn't Sir
Charles too busy?

"Oh, no, I've nothing to do at all."

Yet only that morning he had held forth to Mark at great length on the
amount of work demanded for the management of an estate.

"Now, why do you want to join Burrowes?" Sir Charles inquired presently.

"Well, I hope to be a priest, and I think I should like to spend the
next two years out of the world."

"Yes, that is all very well," said Sir Charles, "but I don't know that I
altogether recommend the O.S.G. I'm not satisfied with the way things
are being run. However, they tell me that this fellow Brother George has
a good deal of common-sense. He has been running their house in Malta,
where he's done some good work. I gave them the land to build a mother
house so that they could train people for active service, as it were;
but Burrowes keeps chopping and changing and sending untrained novices
to take charge of an important branch like Sandgate, and now since
Rowley left he talks of opening a priory in Chatsea. That's all very
well, and it's quite right of him to bear in mind that the main object
of the Order is to work among soldiers; but at the same time he leaves
this place to run itself, and whenever he does come down here he plans
some hideous addition, to pay for which he has to go off preaching for
another three months, so that the Abbey gets looked after by a young
novice of twenty-five. It's ridiculous, you know. I was grumbling at the
Bishop; but really I can understand his disinclination to countenance
Burrowes. I have hopes of Brother George, and I shall take an early
opportunity of talking to him."

Mark was discouraged by Sir Charles' criticism of the Order; and that it
could be criticized like this through the conduct of its founder
accentuated for him the gulf that lay between the English Church and the
rest of Catholic Christendom.

It was not much solace to remember that every Benedictine community was
an independent congregation. One could not imagine the most independent
community's being placed in charge of a novi