f the want or squalor that
he had expected; indeed, so prosperous did many of the houses look, that
he himself began to have an injured feeling, thinking that he had been
brought to befriend people who might very well have befriended
themselves.

It was when they came out at a dip in the hills near the outer sea again
that the girl stopped, and pointing Caius to a house within sight, went
back. This house in the main resembled the other larger houses of the
island; but pine and birch trees were beginning to grow high about it,
and on entering its enclosure Caius trod upon a gravel path, and noticed
banks of earth that in the summer time had held flowers. In front of the
white veranda two powerful mastiffs were lying in the sun. These lions
were not chained; they were looking for him before he appeared, but did
not take the trouble to rise at the sight of him; only a low and ominous
rumble, as of thunder beneath the earth, greeted his approach, and gave
Caius the strong impression that, if need was, they would arise to some
purpose.

A young girl opened the door. She was fresh and pretty-looking, but of
plebeian figure and countenance. Her dress was again gray homespun,
hanging full and short about her ankles. Her manner was different from
that of those people he had been lately meeting, for it had that gentle
reserve and formality that bespeaks training. She ushered him into a
good-sized room, where three other girls like herself were engaged in
sewing. Sitting at a table with a book, from which she had apparently
been reading to them, was the woman in the nun-like dress whom he had
met before. The walls of the room were of unpainted pinewood, planed to
a satin finish, and adorned with festoons of gray moss such as hangs
from forest boughs. This was tied with knots of red bittersweet berries;
the feathers of sea-birds were also displayed on the walls, and chains
of their delicate-coloured eggs were hanging there. Caius had not
stepped across the threshold before he began to suspect that he had
passed from the region of the real into the ideal.

"She is a romantic-minded woman," he said to himself. "I wonder if she
has much sense, after all?"

Then the woman whom he was thus inwardly criticising rose and came
across the room to meet him. Her perfect gravity, her dignity of
bearing, and her gracious greeting, impressed him in spite of himself.
Pictures that one finds in history and fiction of lady abbesses rose
befor