Meanwhile, Chris had heard no further news from Ralph.` He thought of writing to him, and even of visiting him again, but his heart sickened at the thought of it.  It was impossible, he told himself, that any communication should pass between them until his brother had forsaken his horrible business; the first sign of regret must come from the one who had sinned.  He wondered sometimes who the girl was, and, as a hot-headed monk, suspected the worst.  A man who could live as Ralph was living could have no morals left.  She had been so friendly with him, so ready to defend him, so impatient, Chris thought, of any possibility of wrong.  No doubt she, too, was one of the corrupt band, one of the great ladies that buzzed round the Court, and sucked the blood of God’s people.

His own interior life, however, so roughly broken by his new experiences, began to mend slowly as the days went on.

He had begun, like a cat in a new house, to make himself slowly at home in the hostel, and to set up that relation between outward objects and his own self that is so necessary to interior souls not yet living in detachment.  He arranged his little room next the Prior’s to be as much as possible like his cell, got rid of one or two pieces of furniture that distracted him, set his bed in another corner, and hung up his beads in the same position that they used to occupy at Lewes.  Each morning he served the Prior’s mass in the tiny chapel attached to the house, and did his best both then and at his meditation to draw in the torn fibres of his spirit.  At moments of worship the supernatural world began to appear again, like points of living rock emerging through sand, detached and half stifled by external details, but real and abiding.  Little by little his serenity came back, and the old atmosphere reasserted itself.  After all, God was here as there; grace, penance, the guardianship of the angels and the sacrament of the altar was the same at Southwark as at Lewes.  These things remained; while all else was accidental—­the different height of his room, the unfamiliar angles in the passages, the new noises of London, the street cries, the clash of music, the disordered routine of dally life.

Half-way through June, after a long morning’s conversation with a stranger, the Prior sent for him.

He was standing by the tall carved fire-place with his back to the door, his head and one hand leaning against the stone, and he turned round despondently as Chris came in.  Chris could see he was deadly pale and that his lips twitched with nervousness.

“Brother,” he said, “I have a perilous matter to go through, and you must come with me.”

Chris felt his heart begin to labour with heavy sick beats.

“I am to see my Lord of Rochester.  A friend hath obtained the order.  We are to go at five o’clock.  See that you be ready.  We shall take boat at the stairs.”

Chris waited, with his eyes deferentially cast down.