The venerable sub-prior bent his head over the bed. He was a tall, spare man, with very sunken cheeks, and a marvellous expression of placid contentment in his eyes such as one never finds in the face of a young monk. He was very learned in medicines, and in the administration of such simple herbs as were required to remedy the illnesses within the monastery walls. Perhaps some of his patients died when they might have lived under more skilled treatment, but it is a short and easy step from life to death within a comfortless cell, and his bony hands were as tender over his sick brethren as those of a woman. He felt the Englishman's pulse and watched his ashen face for some moments, touching the clammy forehead softly, while René Drucquer stood by with a great sickening weight of remorse and fear upon his heart. Then the sub-prior knelt stiffly down, and placed his clean-shaven lips near to Christian's ear. “My son,” he said, “do you hear me?” Christian breathed less heavily, as if he were listening to some far-off sound, but never moved a feature. Presently he began to murmur incoherently, and the sub-prior bent his ear to listen. “Much good would a blessing of mine do you, Hilda,” observed Christian into the reverend ear. The old gentleman raised his cadaverous head and looked somewhat puzzled. Again he listened. “Look after Aunt Judy--she cannot last long,” murmured the young Englishman in his native tongue, which was unknown to the monk. “It is fever,” said the sub-prior presently--“one of those terrible fevers which kill men as the cold kills flies!” No thought seemed to enter the monk's mind of possible infection. He knelt upon the cold floor with one bare and bony arm beneath the sick man's head, while the other lay across his breast. He was looking intently into the veiled eyes, inhaling the very breath of the swollen lips. “Will he die, my father?” asked René Drucquer in a whisper; his face was as pale as Vellacott's. “He is in the hands of the good God,” was the pious answer. The tall monk rose to his feet and stood before the bed thinking. He rubbed his bony hands together slowly. Through the tiny window a shaft of sunlight poured down upon his grizzled head, and showed up relentlessly the deep furrows that ran diagonally down from his cheek-bone to his chin. “You must watch here, my son,” he continued, “while I inform the Father-Provincial of this.” The venerable sub-prior was no Jesuit, and perhaps he would have been just as well pleased had the Provincial elected to live elsewhere than in the monastery. But the Prior--an old man of ninety, and incapable of work or thought--was completely in the power of the Society. When he found himself alone with the Englishman, René Drucquer sat wearily upon a small wooden bench, the only form of seat provided, and leaned his narrow face upon his hands.