John made no further struggle. Another door had closed on him. But it was not necessary to go to Brother Paul that he might be with him always. The spiritual eye could see everything. Listening to the sounds in the adjoining cell, it was the same at length as if the wall between them had fallen down and the two rooms were one. Whatever Brother Paul did John seemed to see, whatever he said in his hours of pain John seemed to hear, and when he lifted his scuttle of coal from the place at the door where the lay brother left it, John's hand seemed to bear up the weight. It was a poor, pathetic folly, but it brought the comfort of company, and John thought with a pang of the time when he had wished to be separated from Paul, and had all but asked for a cell elsewhere. Paul had a fire, and John could hear him build and light and stir it; and sometimes when this was done he could sit down himself before his own empty grate on his own side of the wall and fancy they were good comrades sitting side by side. As the day passed he thought that Brother Paul on his part also was touched by the same sense of company. His silence at certain moments, his half-articulate salutations, his repetition of the sounds that John himself made, seemed to be the dumb expression of a sense that, in spite of the wall that divided them, and the rule of silence and solitude that separated them on John's side, they were, nevertheless, together. Brother Paul's cough grew rapidly worse, and at last it burst into a fit so long and violent as to seem as if it would never end. John held his breath and listened. “He'll suffocate,” he thought; “he'll never live through it!” But the spasm passed, and there was a prolonged hush, a dead stillness, that was not broken by so much as the sound of a breath. Was he gone? By a sudden impulse, in the agony of his suspense, John stretched out his hand and knocked three times on the wall. There was a short silence, and then faintly, slowly, and irregularly three other knocks came back to him. Paul had understood, and John shouted in his joy. But even on top of his relief came his religious fears. Had he broken the rule of silence? Were they guilty of a sin? Nevertheless, for many days thereafter, though they knew it was a fault, in this vague and dumb and feeble fashion they communicated constantly. On going to bed they rapped “Good-night”: on rising for the day they rapped “Good-morning.” They rapped when the bell rang for midday service, and again when the singing came up through the courtyard. And sometimes they rapped from sympathy and sometimes from pity, and sometimes from mere human loneliness and the love of company. Thus did these exiles from life, struggling to live under the eye of God in obedience to their earthly vow, try to cheer their crushed and fettered souls, and to comfort each other like imprisoned children. XVI. “The Priory, St. John's Wood, London.