egan to take place, Chris
was in a period of abstracted peace, and the rumours of them came to him
as cries from another planet.

Dom Anthony Marks came into the cloister one day from the guest-house
with a great excitement in his face,

"Here is news!" he said, joining himself to Chris and another young monk
with whom the lonely novice was sometimes allowed to walk. "Master
Humphreys, from London, tells me they are all in a ferment there."

Chris looked at him with a deferential coldness, and waited for more.

"They say that Master More hath refused the oath, and that he is lodged
in the Tower, and my Lord of Rochester too."

The young monk burst into exclamations and questions, but Chris was
silent. It was sad enough, but what did it matter to him? What did it
really matter to anyone? God was King.

Dom Anthony was in a hurry, and scuffled off presently to tell the
Prior, and in an hour or two there was an air of excitement through the
house. Chris, however, heard nothing more except the little that the
novice-master chose to tell him, and felt a certain contempt for the
anxious-eyed monks who broke the silence by whispers behind doors, and
the peace of the monastery by their perturbed looks.

* * * * *

Even when a little later in the summer the commissioner came down to
tender the oath of succession Chris heard little and cared less. He was
aware of a fine gentleman striding through the cloister, lolling in the
garth, and occupying a prominent seat in the church; he noticed that his
master was long in coming to him after the protracted chapter-meetings,
but it appeared to him all rather an irrelevant matter. These things
were surely quite apart from the business for which they were all
gathered in the house--the _opus Dei_ and the salvation of souls; this
or that legal document did not seriously affect such high matters.

The novice-master told him presently that the community had signed the
oath, as all others were doing, and that there was no need for anxiety:
they were in the hands of their Religious Superiors.

"I was not anxious," said Chris abruptly, and Dom James hastened to snub
him, and to tell him that he ought to have been, but that novices always
thought they knew everything, and were the chief troubles that Religious
houses had to put up with.

Chris courteously begged pardon, and went to his lessons wondering what
in the world all the pother was about.

But