"I could not see your mother so unhappy and refuse to do what she asked. Oh, Claude, forget that I came here. Forget that we have ever clasped hands since--since you resolve to separate yourself from the world. I will not come between you and the saving of your soul." "Vera," Mrs. Rutherford cried passionately, "have you no compassion for me? Is this how you help me?" "You know that I refused, that I did not want to see him. I ought never to have come. But it is over. We shall never meet again, Claude. This is the last--the very last." "Heartless girl. Have you no thought of my grief?" urged the mother. "No, not when I think of him. If you can come between him and his hope of heaven--I cannot." She turned and walked quickly to the door without another word. Mrs. Rutherford cast one despairing look at her son, before she followed the vanishing figure, muttering, "Cruel, cruel, a heart of stone!" No words were exchanged between the two women as they left the monastery, conducted by the monk, who had waited for them in the stony corridor at the top of the broad marble stairs. He let them out of the heavy iron-lined door, into the neglected garden, where a long row of cypresses showed dark against a saffron sky. The greater part of the garden had been utilised for growing vegetables, upon which the brotherhood for the most part subsisted. Huge orange-red pumpkins sprawled among beds of kale, and patches of Indian corn were golden amidst the rusty green of artichokes gone to seed. It was a melancholy place, and the aspect of it sent an icy chill through Mrs. Rutherford's heart as she thought of that light, airy temperament which had been her son's most delightful gift, the gay insouciance, the joyous outlook that had made him everybody's favourite. He the jester, the trifler, for whom life was always play-time, he to be shut within those frozen walls, immured in a living grave! It was maddening even to think of it. She had talked to him of his religious duties. Oh, God, was it her old woman's preaching that had brought him to this living death? Vera bade her good-bye at the gate, saying that she would rather walk than drive, and left Mrs. Rutherford to return to her hotel alone. "I wonder which of us two is the more unhappy?" she thought. "Why do I wonder? What is her misery measured against mine?"