isher had
restored to him in some measure was gone again; and it was miserable to
look at that white downcast face in the church and refectory, and to
recognise that all self-respect was gone. After his return from his
appearance before Cromwell he was more wretched than ever; it was known
that he had been sent back in contemptuous disgrace; but it was not
known how much he had promised in his terror for life.

The house had lost too some half-dozen of its inmates. Two had
petitioned for release; three professed monks had been dismissed, and a
recent novice had been sent back to his home. Their places in the
stately choir were empty, and eloquent with warning; and in their stead
was a fantastic secular priest, appointed by the Visitors' authority,
who seldom said mass, and never attended choir; but was regular in the
refectory, and the chapter-house where he thundered St. Paul's epistles
at the monks, and commentaries of his own, in the hopes of turning them
from papistry to a purer faith.

The news from outside echoed their own misery. Week after week the tales
poured in, of young and old dismissed back to the world whose ways they
had forgotten, of the rape of treasures priceless not only for their
intrinsic worth but for the love that had given and consecrated them
through years of devout service. There was not a house that had not lost
something; the King himself had sanctioned the work by taking precious
horns and a jewelled cross from Winchester. And worse than all that had
gone was the terror of what was yet to come. The world, which had been
creeping nearer, pausing and creeping on again, had at last passed the
boundaries and leapt to sacrilege.

It was this terror that poisoned life. The sacristan who polished the
jewels that were left, handled them doubtfully now; the monk who
superintended the farm sickened as he made his plans for another year;
the scribe who sat in the carrel lost enthusiasm for his work; for the
jewels in a few months might be on royal fingers, the beasts in
strangers' sheds, and the illuminated leaves blowing over the cobbled
court, or wrapped round grocers' stores.

Dom Anthony preached a sermon on patience one day in Christmastide,
telling his fellows that a man's life, and still less a monk's,
consisted not in the abundance of things that he possessed; and that
corporate, as well as individual, poverty, had been the ideal of the
monastic houses in earlier days. He was no great prea