speak when you ask for
necessaries. And, you know, silence has its peculiar temptations as well
as its joys. There is accidie and scrupulousness and contempt of
others, and a host of snares that you know little of now."

"But--" began Chris.

"Oh, yes; it has its joys, and gives a peculiar strength."

Chris knew, of course, well enough by now in an abstract way what the
Religious discipline would mean, but he wished to have it made more
concrete by examples, and he sat long with the chaplain asking him
questions. Mr. Carleton had been, as he said, in the novitiate at
Canterbury for a few months, and was able to tell him a good deal about
the life there; but the differences between the Augustinians and the
Cluniacs made it impossible for him to go with any minuteness into the
life of the Priory at Lewes. He warned him, however, of the tendency
that every soul found in silence to think itself different from others,
and of so peculiar a constitution that ordinary rules did not apply to
it. He laid so much stress on this that the other was astonished.

"But it is true," said Chris, "no two souls are the same."

The priest smiled.

"Yes, that is true, too; no two sheep are the same, but the sheep nature
is one, and you will have to learn that for yourself. A Religious rule
is drawn up for many, not for one; and each must learn to conform
himself. It was through that I failed myself; I remembered that I was
different from others, and forgot that I was the same."

Mr. Carleton seemed to take a kind of melancholy pleasure in returning
to what he considered his own failure, and Chris began to wonder whether
the thought of it was not the secret of that slight indication to
moroseness that he had noticed in him.

The moon was high and clear by now, and Chris often leaned his cheek on
the sash as the priest talked, and watched that steady shining shield
go up the sky, and the familiar view of lawns and water and trees,
ghostly and mystical now in the pale light.

The Court was silent as he passed through it near midnight, as the
household had been long in bed; the flaring link had been extinguished
two hours before, and the shadows of the tall chimneys lay black and
precise at his feet across the great whiteness on the western side of
the yard. Again the sense of the smallness of himself and his
surroundings, of the vastness of all else, poured over his soul; these
little piled bricks and stones, the lawns and woods round