“I admit nothing after 1520,” said Sir Charles proudly.

Mark wondered why so fastidious a medievalist allowed the Order of St. George to erect those three tin tabernacles and to matchboard the interior of the Abbey.  But perhaps that was only another outer shell which would gradually be filled.

Lunch was a disappointment, because when Sir Charles began to talk about the monastery, which was what Mark had been wanting to talk about all the morning, Lady Landells broke in: 

“I am sorry, Charles, but I’m afraid that I must beg for complete silence at lunch, as I’m in the middle of a sonnet.”

The poetess sighed, took a large mouthful of food, and sighed again.

After lunch Sir Charles took Mark to see his library, which reminded him of a Rossetti interior and lacked only a beautiful long-necked creature, full-lipped and auburn-haired, to sit by the casement languishing over a cithern or gazing out through bottle-glass lights at a forlorn and foreshortened landscape of faerie land.

“Poor Lady Landells was a little tiresome at lunch,” said Sir Charles half to himself.  “She gets moods.  Women seem never to grow out of getting moods.  But she has always been most kind to me, and she insists on giving me anything I want for my house.  Last year she was good enough to buy it from me as it stands, so it’s really her house, although she has left it back to me in her will.  She took rather a fancy to you by the way.”

Mark, who had supposed that Lady Landells had regarded him with aversion and scorn, stared at this.

“Didn’t she give you her hand when you said good-bye?” asked Sir Charles.

“Her left hand,” said Mark.

“Oh, she never gives her right hand to anybody.  She has some fad about spoiling the magnetic current of Apollo or something.  Now, what about a walk?”

Mark said he should like to go for a walk very much, but wasn’t Sir Charles too busy?

“Oh, no, I’ve nothing to do at all.”

Yet only that morning he had held forth to Mark at great length on the amount of work demanded for the management of an estate.

“Now, why do you want to join Burrowes?” Sir Charles inquired presently.

“Well, I hope to be a priest, and I think I should like to spend the next two years out of the world.”

“Yes, that is all very well,” said Sir Charles, “but I don’t know that I altogether recommend the O.S.G.  I’m not satisfied with the way things are being run.  However, they tell me that this fellow Brother George has a good deal of common-sense.  He has been running their house in Malta, where he’s done some good work.  I gave them the land to build a mother house so that they could train people for active service, as it were; but Burrowes keeps chopping and changing and sending untrained novices to take charge of an important branch like Sandgate, and now since Rowley left he talks of opening a priory in Chatsea.  That’s all