“My dear Murrel,” cried Herne with impulsive simplicity, “this is quite quixotic!”

Murrel sprang to his feet and sent up a single shout of laughter.

“You have made the best joke in three hundred years,” he said.

“I don’t see it,” said Herne thoughtfully. “Is it generally considered possible to make a joke and not to see it? But in the matter of what you said, don’t you think there might be a statute of limitations allowing you a fresh start? Would you like to go down–down to the west again?”

Murrel’s brow seemed knotted with a new embarrassment. “The truth is I rather avoided the neighbourhood–and the subject. I thought that you–”

“I know what you mean,” said Herne. “For a long time I could hardly look out of a window facing that way. I wanted to turn my back on the west wind; and the sunsets burned me like red-hot irons. But a man gets calmer as the years go by, even if he doesn’t get more cheerful. I don’t think I could go to the house itself; but I would really be glad to hear the news about–anybody.”

“Oh if we go there,” said Murrel cheerfully, “I’ll undertake to go in and enquire.”

“Do you mean,” asked Herne almost timidly, “go into–Seawood Abbey?”

“Yes,” answered Murrel shortly. “I daresay we’re in the same boat. I might find the other house a little harder.”

They completed the rest of their programme by a tacit, not to say taciturn agreement; and so it fell out that, before they had exchanged many more words, they had actually come within sight of all that for so long they had not seen and had avoided seeing; the evening sun on the high lawns of Seawood and the steep Gothic roofs among the trees.

Certainly they needed no words of explanation when Michael Herne halted and looked across at his friend, as if bidding him go on. Murrel nodded and went quickly with his light and agile step up the steep woodland path and over the stile and dropped into the avenue leading up to the main gateway. The gardens seemed much as they were of old, but rather neater and in some nameless fashion quieter; but the great gate, that had always stood open, was shut.

Monkey was no mystic; but this fact affected him with a mournful thrill that had in it something of mysticism. That incongruous element increased upon him in some indescribable subconscious way as he approached the great doors and, for the first time in his life, knocked on them and rang a great iron bell. He felt rather as if he were in a dream; and yet as if he were near to some more strange awakening. But queer as were his unformed anticipations, they were not so queer as what he found.

About half an hour afterwards he came out of the great doorway, which was closed after him, climbed the stile and came quietly down the lane to his friend; but even while he was still approaching, his friend felt that there was something odd about his quietude. He sat down on the bank and ruminated for a moment; then he said: “An extraordinary thing has happened to Seawood Abbey. It has not been exactly burned to the ground, because somehow it seems to be still there, and looking rather more well-preserved than before. It has not been, in any material or meteorological sense struck by lightning from heaven. And yet I am not sure . . . anyhow a most stunning and crashing catastrophe has fallen on that Abbey.”

“What do you mean? What has happened to the Abbey?”

“It has become an Abbey,” said Murrel gravely.

“What do you mean?” cried the other, leaning forward with sudden eagerness.

“I mean what I say. It has become an Abbey. I have just been talking to the Abbot. He told me a good deal of the news, in spite of his monastic seclusion; for he knows a number of our old friends.”

“You mean it is a monastery. What news did he give you?”

“He was full of Society Snippets,” said Murrel in his melancholy voice. “It all began with Lord Seawood dying about a year ago. The property went to his–his heiress, who it seems has ‘gone over’ as the saying is. She’s become a Catholic; and a very extraordinary sort of Catholic too. She has given up all this vast property to my friend the Abbot and his merry men; and gone down to work as a nurse in some Catholic settlement or other down in the Docks; Limehouse, I think, where Chinamen strangle their daughters according to the Twelve Immortal Principles.”

The pale librarian had sprung up with all the energy of knight-errantry; but his look was turned away from the towers of Seawood.

“I hardly understand it yet,” he said, “but it is all different. It is difficult but it is different. It is difficult because it seems strange to . . .”

“It seems strange,” asserted Murrel, “to go down to Limehouse and ask a Chinese strangler for The Honourable Rosamund Severne. But I ought to tell you on the authority of the Abbot, that she declares that her name is not Rosamund Severne. I understand you may find her if you enquire for Miss Smith.”

And at that once more did lunacy strike the librarian of Seawood like lightning out of heaven; and leaping over a hedge he went racing eastwards towards a pinewood that lay across his path, which might be presumed to be on the outskirts of Limehouse and offer opportunities for enquiring after Miss Smith.

It was rather more than three months later that the lunatics’ progress came to its appointed end, and this story with it. Its pace had changed from capering to something more like plodding and to threading the labyrinths of the lowest quarters of Limehouse. But it ended one night when a sort of green fog of dusk hung like the fumes of some drug of witchcraft, as he turned down a crack of narrow street, at the corner of which hung a painted paper lantern. A little further down the dim defile glowed another lantern; which looked less Chinese; and when he came close to it he saw it was a leaden cage fitted with large fragments of coloured glass, the rude outline showing a figure of St. Francis with a burning red angel behind him. Somehow this childish transparency seemed like a password and a signal of all that he had once sought to do on a great scale or Olive Ashley on a small one; and yet with some secret and vivid difference; that the lamp was lit from within.

So much was that great thirst for colour, which had filled his life, fed as from a goblet of flame, by that trivial sign and in this sordid place, that it scarcely surprised him to find himself in her presence, who stood crowned in his dreams as in the melodrama and the tragedy of other days. A straight dark dress hung on her from neck to heel, but it was of a normal pattern; and her red hair still looked like a crown.

With that queer awkward promptitude, that belonged to him alone, he said his simplest thought in plain words, “You are a nurse and not a nun.”

She smiled. “You don’t know much about nuns if you think that is the natural ending of a story–a story like ours. Believe me, there’s nothing in that sentimental notion that being a nun is a second best.”

“Do you really mean,” he said and then stopped.

“I mean,” she said, “that I never quite left off thinking that I might have the luck to be the second best. I suppose it’s the sort of thing that has been said a good many times. . . . I think I have always thought you would find me.”

After a momentary pause she went on: “We need not remember about that old quarrel; I think it was always something much better and much worse than a quarrel. My father was less to blame than you thought him; more to blame than I thought him; but it is neither you nor I that are to judge. But it was not he who did the real wrong of which all these wrongs have sprung.”

“I know what you mean,” he replied. “I had rather begun to think so myself, the more I read of history. But in all that history there is nothing so noble as you and what you have done. You are the greatest of historical characters; and the learned may come to call you a legend.”