It was night when he again woke.  A little lamp revealed bare walls of stone, a low, timbered ceiling, a floor of red tiles.  Basil’s eyes, as soon as they were open, looked for the venerable figure which he remembered.  Finding no one, he thought the memory was but of a dream.  Feeling wonderfully at ease in body and calm in mind, he lay musing on that vision of the noble countenance, doubting after all whether a dream could have left so distinct an impression, when all at once there fell upon his ear a far sound of chanting, a harmony so sweetly solemn that it melted his heart and filled his eyes with tears.  Not long after, when all was silent again, he heard the sound of soft footsteps without, and in the same moment the door of his cell opened.  The face which looked in seemed not quite unknown to him, though he could not recall where he had seen it.

‘You have slept long, dear brother,’ said Marcus, with a happy smile.  ‘Is all well with you?’

‘Well, God he thanked,’ was the clear but faint reply.

The poet-physician, a small, nervous, bright-eyed man of some forty years, sat down on a stool by the bedside and began talking cheerfully.  He had just come from matins, and was this morning excused from lauds because it behoved him to gather certain herbs, to be used medicinally in the case of a brother who had fallen sick yesterday.  Touching a little gold locket which Basil wore round his neck on a gold thread he asked what this contained, and being told that it was a morsel of the Crown of Thorns, he nodded with satisfaction.

’We questioned whether to leave it on you or not, for we could not open it, and there was a fear lest it might contain something’—­he smiled and shook his bead and sighed—­’much less sacred.  The lord abbot, doubtless’—­here his voice sank—­’after a vision, though of this he spoke not, decided that it should be left.  There was no harm, for all that’—­his eyes twinked merrily—­’in tying this upon the place where you suffered so grievously.’

From amid Basil’s long hair he detached what looked like a tiny skein of hemp, which, with an air singularly blended of shrewdness and reverence, he declared to be a portion of a garb of penitence worn by the Holy Martin, to whom the oratory here was dedicated.  Presently Basil found strength to ask whether the abbot had been beside him.

‘Many times,’ was the answer.  ’The last, no longer ago than yestereve, ere he went to compline.  You would have seen him on the day of your arrival, ere yet you became distraught, but that a heaviness lay upon him because of the loss of a precious manuscript on its way hither from Rome—­a manuscript which had been procured for him after much searching, only to be lost by the folly of one to whom it was intrusted; if, indeed, it was not rather whisked away by the Evil One, who, powerless for graver ill against our holy father, at times seeks to discomfort him by small practice of spite.  Sorrow for this loss brought on a distemper to which his age is subject.’