Mr. Carleton looked at him smiling. He had a pleasant ugly face, with little kind eyes and sensitive mouth. “You must ask Mr. Ralph,” he said, “or rather you must not. But he knows more than any of us.” “I wish he would not speak like that.” “Dear lad,” said the priest, “you must not feel it like that. Remember our Lord bore contempt as well as pain.” There was silence a moment, and then Chris began again. “Tell me about Lewes, father. What will it be like?” “It will be bitterly hard,” said the priest deliberately. “Christ Church was too bitter for me, as you know. I came out after six months, and the Cluniacs are harder. I do not know if I lost my vocation or found it; but I am not the man to advise you in either case.” “Ralph thinks it is easy enough. He told me last night in the carriage that I need not trouble myself, and that monks had a very pleasant time. He began to tell me some tale about Glastonbury, but I would not hear it.” “Ah,” said the chaplain regretfully, “the world’s standard for monks is always high. But you will find it hard enough, especially in the first year. But, as I said, I am not the man to advise you--I failed.” Chris looked at him with something of pity in his heart, as the priest fingered the iron pen on the table, and stared with pursed lips and frowning forehead. The chaplain was extraordinarily silent in public, just carrying on sufficient conversation not to be peculiar or to seem morose, but he spoke more freely to Chris, and would often spend an hour or two in mysterious talk with Sir James. Chris’s father had a very marked respect for the priest, and had had more than one sharp word with his wife, ten years before when he had first come to the house, and had found Lady Torridon prepared to treat her chaplain with the kind of respect that she gave to her butler. But the chaplain’s position was secured by now, owing in a large measure to his own tact and unobtrusiveness, and he went about the house a quiet, sedate figure of considerable dignity and impressiveness, performing his duties punctually and keeping his counsel. He had been tutor to both the sons for a while, to Ralph only for a few months, but to Chris since his twelfth birthday, and the latter had formed with him a kind of peaceful confederacy, often looking in on him at unusual hours, always finding him genial, although very rarely confidential. It was to Mr. Carleton, too, that Chris owed his first drawings to the mystical life of prayer; there was a shelf of little books in the corner by the window of the priest’s room, from which he would read to the boy aloud, first translating them into English as he went, and then, as studies progressed, reading the Latin as it stood; and that mysteriously fascinating world in which great souls saw and heard eternal things and talked familiarly with the Saviour and His Blessed Mother had first dawned on the boy there. New little books, too, appeared from time to