“I do not blame you, my son, for your scrupulous cast of mind.  Only beware of letting it chill your enthusiasm.  Satan may avail himself of it one day, and attack your faith.  Solomon was just.  Our Blessed Lord, by our cowardly standards, was unjust.  Remembering the Gadarene swine, the barren fig-tree, the parable of the wedding-guest without a garment, Martha and Mary. . . .”

“Martha and Mary!” interrupted Mark.  “Why, that was really the point at issue.  And the ointment that might have been sold for the benefit of the poor.  Yes, Judas would have voted with the Reverend Brother.”

“And Pontius Pilate would have remained neutral,” added Father Burrowes, his blue eyes glittering with delight at the effect upon Mark of his words.

But when Mark was walking back to the Abbey down the winding drive among the hazels, he wished that he and not the Reverend Father had used that illustration.  However, useless regrets for his indecision in the matter of the priory at Aldershot were soon obliterated by a new cause of division, which was the arrival of the Reverend Andrew Hett on the Vigil of the Annunciation, just in time to sing first Vespers.

It fell to Mark’s lot to entertain the new chaplain that evening, because Brother Jerome who had become guest-master when Brother Anselm took his place as cellarer was in the infirmary.  Mark was scarcely prepared for the kind of personality that Hett’s proved to be.  He had grown accustomed during his time at the Abbey to look down upon the protagonists of ecclesiastical battles, so little else did any of the guests who visited them want to discuss, so much awe was lavished upon them by Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine.  It did not strike Mark that the fight at St. Agnes’ might appear to the large majority of people as much a foolish squabble over trifles, a cherishing of the letter rather than the spirit of Christian worship, as the dispute between Mr. So-and-so and the Bishop of Somewhere-or-other in regard to his use of the Litany of the Saints in solemn procession on high days and holy days.

Andrew Hett revived in Mark his admiration of the bigot, which would have been a dangerous thing to lose in one’s early twenties.  The chaplain was a young man of perhaps thirty-five, tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired, with a complexion of extreme pallor.  His light-blue eyes were very red round the rims, and what eyebrows he possessed slanted up at a diabolic angle.  His voice was harsh, high, and rasping as a guinea fowl’s.  When Mark brought him his supper, Hett asked him several questions about the Abbey time-table, and then said abruptly: 

“The ugliness of this place must be soul-destroying.”

Mark looked at the Guest-chamber with new eyes.  There was such a force of assertion in Hett’s tone that he could not contradict him, and indeed it certainly was ugly.

“Nobody can live with matchboarded walls and ceilings and not suffer for it,” Hett went on.  “Why didn’t you buy an old tithe barn and live in that?  It’s an insult to Almighty God to worship Him in such surroundings.”