grace, but their base must be on the
ground or their labour would be ill-spent. They must be mystically one
with the world that they had resigned.

Chris forgot this; and laboured, and to a large extent succeeded, in
detaching himself wholly; and symptoms of this mistake showed themselves
in such things as tending to despise secular life, feeling impatient
with the poor to whom he had to minister, in sneering in his heart at
least at anxious fussy men who came to arrange for masses, at
troublesome women who haunted the sacristy door in a passion of
elaborateness, and at comfortable families who stamped into high mass
and filled a seat and a half, but who had yet their spiritual burdens
and their claims to honour.

But he was to be brought rudely down to facts again. He was beginning to
forget that England was about him and stirring in her agony; and he was
reminded of it with some force in the winter after his profession.

* * * * *

He was going out to the gate-house one day on an errand from the
junior-master when he became aware of an unusual stir in the court.
There were a couple of palfreys there, and half-a-dozen mules behind,
whilst three or four strange monks with a servant or two stood at their
bridles.

Chris stopped to consider, for he had no business with guests; and as he
hesitated the door of the guest-house opened, and two prelates came out
with Dom Anthony behind them--tall, stately men in monks' habits with
furred cloaks and crosses. Chris slipped back at once into the cloister
from which he had just come out, and watched them go past to the Prior's
lodging.

They appeared at Vespers that afternoon again, sitting in the first
returned stalls near the Prior, and Chris recognised one of them as the
great Abbot of Colchester. He looked at him now and again during Vespers
with a reverential awe, for the Abbot was a great man, a spiritual peer
of immense influence and reputation, and watched that fatherly face,
his dignified bows and stately movements, and the great sapphire that
shone on his hand as he turned the leaves of his illuminated book.

The two prelates were at supper, sitting on either side of the Prior on
the dais; and afterwards the monks were called earlier than usual from
recreation into the chapter-house.

The Prior made them a little speech saying that the Abbot had something
to say to them, and then sat down; his troubled eyes ran over the faces
of h