MEANTIME, though they worked quietly, they were both very industrious; and at last one day, late in October, when the first snow was beginning to fall, Brother Stephen finished the last page of the beautiful book. He gave a sigh as he laid down his paintbrush; not because he was tired, but because in his heart he was really sorry to finish his work, for he knew that then it would soon be taken away, and he hated to part with it. As he and Gabriel laid all the pages together in the order in which they were to go, brother Stephen's heart swelled with pride, and Gabriel thought he had never seen anything half so lovely! The text was written in beautiful letters of the lustrous black ink which Gabriel had made; and at the beginnings of new chapters, wonderful initial letters glittered in gold and colours till they looked like little mosaics of precious stones. Here and there through the text were scattered exquisite miniature pictures of saints and angels; while as for the borders that enclosed every page, they wreathed around the written words such lovely garlands of painted blossoms, that to Gabriel the whole book seemed a marvellous bouquet of all the sweet flowers he had daily gathered from the Norman fields, and that Brother Stephen, by the magic of his art, had made immortal. Indeed the little boy fairly blinked as he looked at the sparkling beauty of those pages where the blossoms were to live on, through the centuries, bright and beautiful and unharmed by wind or rain or the driving snow, that even then was covering up all the bare frost-smitten meadows without. And so Gabriel turned over page after page shining with gold and purple and rose-colour, till he came to the very last of the text; and then he saw that there was yet one page more, and on turning over this he read these words: "I, Brother Stephen, of the Abbey of St. Martin-de-Bouchage, made this book; and for every initial letter and picture and border of flowers that I have herein wrought, I pray the Lord God to have compassion upon some one of my grievous sins!" This was written in beautifully, and all around it was painted a graceful border like braided ribbons of blue. Now in Brother Stephen's time, when any one finished an especially beautiful illumination of any part of the Bible, it was quite customary for the artist to add, at the end, a little prayer. Indeed, no one can make a really beautiful thing without loving the work; and those old-time artist-monks took such delight in the flowery pages they painted, that they felt sure the dear Lord himself could not help but be pleased to have his words made so beautiful, and that he would so grant the little prayer at the end of the book, because of the loving labour that had gone before. As Gabriel again read over Brother Stephen's last page, it set him to thinking; and a little later, as he walked home in the frosty dusk, he thought of it again.