Antonio started. The young man's tone was respectful, and it was evident that he was speaking sympathetically of matters about which he had been reading and thinking. Isabel, however, took little notice of the answer. As usual, she hardly recognized young Crowberry's continued existence. One after another she pulled out Antonio's empty drawers and opened his empty cupboards. Had she realized that the monks had been expelled only seven years before and that many of them must be still living, nothing in the world would have induced her to pry into their sancta; but it was evident that she pictured the monks of Portugal pretty much as she pictured the monks of old England. To her they were forgotten men, vanished into dust ages ago; and there could be no more indelicacy in ransacking their old haunts than in examining the sculptures of a long-empty sarcophagus. From the cell they went to the cloister. There Isabel quickly espied the spiral staircase; and, having ascended it, she sat down on Antonio's favorite seat of cork. The quiet beauty of the scene subdued her; and not a syllable was spoken until they had retraced their steps and reached the monks' entrance to the chapel. Before setting foot in the monastery young Crowberry had thrown away his cigar; and on the chapel threshold, with unostentatious reverence, he uncovered his head. They went in, young Crowberry leading. No irreparable injury had been done. Only in the north-west corner of the nave was there any trace of Sir Percy's operations. He had taken down part of a creamy marble cornice which ran along the top edge of the azulejos, level with the sills of the high-placed windows. A circular saw occupied the marble's old place. On the floor were two carboys of acid, a short ladder, and half a dozen chisels, large and small. By tacit consent none of the three mentioned this display of apparatus. Indeed, they affected not to see it. Young Crowberry still took the initiative. Standing opposite the western wall, he besought Antonio to explain the azulejos. The ten blue-and-white pictures were worked out in tiles which encrusted the walls to a height of about fifteen feet. There was one on each side of the grand western door, and there were four on each of the north and south walls of the nave. Each picture measured about twelve feet across and was framed in decorative tile-work wherein green and yellow were added to the blue. Antonio began on the right-hand side of the western door. "First," he said, "we have the Saint's birth. Like our divine Lord, he was born an outcast. His mother and father were on pilgrimage. Notice the Latin scroll, _Non erat eis locus in diversorio_: 'There was no room for them in the inn.' Through the trees you see the village of Carcavoa as it was before the earthquake, with a Gothic church and two spires." The next picture was the one from which Sir Percy had removed the cornice; but Antonio did not change his tone.