At his request she got down another of the ponderous volumes of Sassolini from the high shelf, and read to him, translating from the Italian the brief notice of the ancient church of Dulcigno, which, it appeared, had been built in the Lombard-Norman style of the eleventh century, while the campanile, with columns from Paestum, dated from 1276.

The third seal, the circular one, was larger than the rest, being quite two inches across.  In the centre of the top half was the Madonna with Child, seated, a male and female figure on either side.  Below were three female figures on either side, the two scenes being divided by a festoon of flowers, while around the edge ran in somewhat more modern characters—­those of the early sixteenth century—­the following: 

+ SIGILLVM .  VICARIS .  GENERALIS .  ORDINIS .  Beata .  Maria .  D’ mon .  Carmel +

“This,” declared Sir Henry, after a long and most minute examination, “is a treasure probably unequalled in the collection at Cambridge, being the actual seal of the Vicar-General of the Carmelite order.  Its date I should place at about 1150.  Look well, dear, at those flower garlands; how beautifully they are engraved!  Seal-making is, alas! to-day a lost art.  We have only crude and heavy attempts.  The company seal seems to-day the only thing the engraver can turn out—­those machines which emboss upon a big red wafer.”  And his busy fingers were continuously feeling the great circular bronze matrix, and a moment afterwards its sulphur-cast.

He was an enthusiastic antiquary, and long ago, in the days when the world was light, had read papers before the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House upon mediaeval seals and upon the early Latin codices.  Nowadays, however, Gabrielle acted as his eyes; and so devoted was she to her father that she took a keen interest in his dry-as-dust hobbies, so that after his long tuition she could decipher and read a twelfth-century Latin manuscript, on its scrap of yellow, crinkled parchment, and with all its puzzling abbreviations, almost as well as any professor of palaeography at the universities, while inscriptions upon Gothic seals were to her as plain as a paragraph in a newspaper.  More than once, white-haired, spectacled professors who came to Glencardine as her father’s guests were amazed at her intelligent conversation upon points which were quite abstruse.  Indeed, she had no idea of the remarkable extent of her own antiquarian knowledge, all of it gathered from the talented man whose affliction had kept her so close at his side.

For quite an hour her father fingered the three seal-impressions, discussing them with her in the language of a savant.  She herself examined them minutely and expressed opinions.  Now and then she glanced apprehensively to that open window.  He pointed out to her where she was wrong in her estimate of the design of the circular one, explaining a technical and little-known detail concerning the seals of the Carmelite order.