He looked up involuntarily at the timepiece. “It--it is after ten o’clock. It is too late.” “Yes. Now the respectable community is making ready for sleep, and the other half is only just awaking. I, too, am respectable. I go to bed. Life in a monastery is dull at times, and deathly fatiguing.” And so he left the room, and went to his own bed-chamber. And there alone, with no borrowed, artificial light but that subdued from his own presence and the signet-ring, he sat and wrote a letter to his wife--in the surrounding darkness. Often he laughed--sometimes he frowned whilst writing--and of the great High Priest he said, with other things: “He is worse to drive than a young calf, and worse to lead than an old bull--so that, even with the ring in his nose, I can never be quite sure of him. I have taken so much pains with him, that at last I have become impatient, and I find it does not answer badly. But these simpletons are really too much trouble. He is insolent enough to take anything I give him, without so much as ‘Thank you’--but in that they’re all alike. He forced my hand the other night into giving him some of my own power of feeling, but that hasn’t answered--it rarely does unless, of course, the girl were present--which she was not. And this familiarity--this living with an awkward brute who fancies himself infallible, and who, I am beginning to find, has only the one weak spot, vanity, like his less cooped-up neighbours--is beginning to tell upon my temper. Had I not you to fall back upon in reverie, I should throw him up and be quit of him; for breathing the same air with these mortals for any length of time is insufferable--they contaminate everything. But when I think of you----” Was it not Merriman--so lately dead; by some, perhaps, soon forgotten--who, in that last, sad book with its prophetic, mournful ending, even in light, spoke of the sacredness of certain letters--even mortal? CHAPTER XVI Next morning, Marigold, in the patchwork gown and a pretty muslin apron, went in very early to take Patches his breakfast. He was still in bed, so she went upstairs, calling: “Patches! here’s your breakfast, and the nurse.” It was such a little cupboard of a bedroom, and such a tiny make-believe of a bed, and everything was so poor and shabby, that Marigold’s throat went quite lumpy again. Only, on the wall, opposite the bed, was a beautiful painting of a woman’s head--a very tender, delicate face, with a haunting look in the eyes, half-laughter, half-tenderness. When Marigold saw that face, the lumps went out of her throat, and she felt very jealous. “Who is that, Patches?” she asked, standing to look. “I don’t know,” he answered; “Dr Quack brought it, and set it up there for me to look at when the night is long. He says she was a very good woman, and she died a long time ago. He says she was so beautiful and good, that even the Serpent loved her, and she went to Heaven.”