arth; each cell-door, with
its hatch for the passage of food, was closed and silent; and Ralph felt
a curious quickening of his heart as he thought of the human life passed
in the little houses, each with its tiny garden, its workshop, its two
rooms, and its paved ambulatory, in which each solitary lived. How
strangely apart this place was from the buzz of business from which he
had come! And yet he knew very well that the whole was as good as
condemned already.

He wondered to himself how they had taken the news of the tragedy that
was beginning--those white, demure men with shaved heads and faces, and
downcast eyes. He reflected what the effect of that news must be; as it
penetrated each day, like a stone dropped softly into a pool, leaving no
ripple. There, behind each brown door, he fancied to himself, a strange
alchemy was proceeding, in which each new terror and threat from outside
was received into the crucible of a beating heart and transmuted by
prayer and welcome into some wonderful jewel of glory--at least so these
poor men believed; and Ralph indignantly told himself it was nonsense;
they were idlers and dreamers. He reminded himself of a sneer he had
heard against the barrels of Spanish wine that were taken in week by
week at the monastery door; if these men ate no flesh too, at least they
had excellent omelettes.

But as he passed at last through the lay-brothers' choir and stood
looking through the gates of the Fathers' choir up to the rich altar
with its hangings and its posts on either side crowned with gilded
angels bearing candles, to the splendid window overhead, against which,
as in a glory, hung the motionless silk-draped pyx, the awe fell on him
again.

This was the place where they met, these strange, silent men; every
panel and stone was saturated with the prayers of experts, offered three
times a day--in the night-office of two or three hours when the world
was asleep; at the chapter-mass; and at Vespers in the afternoon.

His heart again stirred a little, superstitiously he angrily told
himself, at the memory of the stories that were whispered about in town.

Two years ago, men said, a comet had been seen shining over the house.
As the monks went back from matins, each with his lantern in his hand,
along the dark cloister, a ray had shot out from the comet, had glowed
upon the church and bell-tower, and died again into darkness. Again, a
little later, two monks, one in his cell-garden and