"If I did not know that the Senhorita is witty I should say that the Senhorita is doing herself a little injustice." She knitted her brows while she framed an answer. "Yes," she said. "The Senhor is right. The Senhorita is doing herself a little injustice. She ought to add, in her own defense, that she wouldn't have agreed so easily to come here had she known that anybody cared about the place. She thought nobody would be one atom the worse, save the bats and spiders. Yesterday she learned the truth. But she learned it too late." In his eagerness the monk strode close to her side. "Too late?" he echoed. "No, it is not too late. You have great influence with your father. There are fifty places in Portugal cheaper and more accessible and all together more convenient than this for your experiments and your railways." "Don't call them mine," she commanded. "I hate and loathe them all. But, I repeat, it is too late. Neither I nor anyone else in this world has a grain of influence with my father. Opposition drives him mad." Her tone was even more decisive than her words. But Antonio could not face the fact that he was beaten. Had not Mr. Crowberry distinctly stated that Sir Percy had gained possession of the abbey solely by the help of Isabel's private fortune? She was not a schoolgirl. She was of full age; and if she was paying the piper surely she had something to do with calling the tune. Yet how was he to remind her of her rights? Was not his intervention sure to be resented as the extreme of impertinence? Mr. Crowberry had not said that his revelations concerning the Kaye-Templeman finances were made in confidence; but probably this was an oversight of which it would be mean to take advantage. The painful silence lengthened. Antonio ended it by starting on a new line. "Those tiles," he said, "are not mere curiosities, to be carted about from one museum to another. I feel as if they are alive--as if your illustrious father will be flaying a living thing when he tears them from the wall. They were not ordered from a shop, and unpacked, and stuck all over the chapel like so much wallpaper from Paris. They represent the life and miracles and martyrdom of a saint of this Order--a saint of the Portuguese Benedictine congregation who spent ten years in this monastery. He died in your England, for the Faith." She moved uneasily. Thinking he was gaining his point Antonio continued: "Those tiles were not the work of one hireling artist. In a sense the whole community drew and painted them. Until they were turned out the monks cherished the archives of their abbey; and these showed how, under three successive Abbots, the cartoons gradually grew to perfection. Look. From here you can see the cemetery where the bones of those dead monks lie. Their souls will bless you from heaven if you will spare the chapel they made so glorious."