Dom Anthony nodded approvingly at the table, took up a knife and rubbed it delicately on the napkin, and turned round.

“We will look here,” he said, and went towards the second door by the fire.  Christopher followed him, and found himself in the bedroom, furnished with the same simplicity as the other; but with an iron bedstead in the corner, a kneeling stool beside it, with a little French silver image of St. Mary over it, and a sprig of dried yew tucked in behind.  A thin leather-bound copy of the Little Office of Our Lady lay on the sloping desk, with another book or two on the upper slab.  Dom Anthony went to the window and threw that open too.

“Your luggage is unpacked, I see,” he said, nodding to the press beside which lay the two trunks, emptied now by Mr. Morris’s careful hands.

“There are some hares, too,” said Christopher.  “Ralph has sent them to my Lord Prior.”

“The porter has them,” said the monk, “they look strangely like a bribe.”  And he nodded again with a beaming face, and his eyes grew little and bright at his own humour.

He examined the bed before he left the room again, turned back the sheets and pressed them down, and the straw rustled drily beneath; glanced into the sweating earthenware jug, refolded the coarse towel on its wooden peg, and then smiled again at the young man.

“Supper,” he said briefly.

Christopher stayed a moment with a word of excuse to wash off the dust of his ride from his hands and face, and when he came back into the sitting-room found the candles lighted, the wooden shutters folded over the windows, and a basin of soup with a roast pigeon steaming on the table.  The monk was standing, waiting for him by the door.

“I must be gone, Chris,” he said, “but I shall be back before compline.  My Lord Prior will see you to-morrow.  There is nothing more?  Remember you are at home now.”

And on Christopher’s assurances that he had all he could need, he was gone, leisurely and cheerfully, and his footsteps sounded on the stairs.

Mr. Morris came up before Chris had finished supper, and as he silently slipped away his plate and set another for the cheese, Chris remembered with a nervous exultation that this would be probably the last time that he would have a servant to wait on him.  He was beginning to feel strangely at home already; the bean soup was strong and savoury, the beer cool; and he was pleasantly exercised by his ride.  Mr. Morris, too, in answer to his enquiries, said that he had been well looked after in the servants’ quarters of the guest-house, and had had an entertaining supper with an agreeable Frenchman who, it seemed, had come with the Cluniac commissioners.  Respect for his master and a sense of the ludicrous struggled in Mr. Morris’s voice as he described the foreigner’s pronunciation and his eloquent gestures.

“He’s not like a man, sir,” he said, and shook with reminiscent laughter.