The monk cast a penetrating glance at his visitor. He understood the gesture and the silence with that quick comprehension that came to him who was to reform Holy Catholic Church from the abuse of decades--as an intuition. "But now, my son, speak of yourself," said the monk after a pause. "I lived at the court of Avalon, the home of Love and Troubadours." "Of Troubadours?" the monk interposed dreamily. "A worldly lot--given to extolling free love and what not--" "They may sing of love and passion, father, but their lives are pure and chaste," Tristan ventured to remonstrate. "You are a Troubadour?" came the swift query. "In my humble way." Tristan replied with bowed head. The monk nodded. "Go on--go on!" "At the court of Avalon I met the consort of Count Roger de Laval. He was much absent, on one business or another,--the chase--feuds with neighboring barons.--He chose me to help the Lady Hellayne to while away the long hours during his absence--" "His wife! What folly!" "The Count de Laval is one of those men who would tempt the heavens themselves to fall upon him rather than to air himself beneath them. That his fair young wife, doing his will among men given to the chase and drinking bouts, and the society of tainted damsels, should long for something higher, she, whom he regarded with the high air of the lord of creation--that she should dare dream of some intangible something, for which she hungered, and craved and starved--" "If you are about to confess, as I conceive, to a wrong you have done to this same lord," interposed the monk, "your sin is not less black if you paint him you have wronged in odious tints." "Nevertheless I am most sorry to do so, father," Tristan interposed, "else could I not make you understand to its full extent his folly and conceit by placing me, a creature of emotion, day by day beside so fair a being as his young wife. Therefore I would explain." "It needs some explanation truly!" the monk said sternly. "The Count de Laval is a man whose conceit is so colossal, father, that he would never think it possible that any one could fail in love and admiration at the shrine which he built for himself. A man of supreme arrogance and self-righteousness." "Sad, indeed--" mused the monk. "Our thoughts were pagan, drifting back to the days when the world was peopled with sylvan creatures--with the deities of field and stream--" "Mere heathen dreams," interposed the monk. "Go on! Go on!" "I then felt within myself the impulse to throw forth a minstrelsy prophetic of a new world resembling that old which had vanished. It was not to be a mere chant of wrath or exultation--it was to sound the joy of the earth, of the air, of the sun, of the moon and the stars,--the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers--" "Words that have but little meaning left in this stern world wherein we dwell--"