A month has passed: the sun is streaming through the tall narrow windows of a small chapel; the air is flooded with the music that floats from the organ loft, the solemn strains of a requiem chanted by sweet boy-voices; clouds of fragrant incense half obscure the altar, where the priest in black vestments is offering the solemn sacrifice of the Mass for the repose of the soul of one whom Paul had loved dearly ever since he was a child. There is one chief mourner kneeling before the altar—it is Paul Clitheroe.
When the Mass is over, while the exquisite silence of the place is broken only by the occasional note of some bird lodging in the branches of the trees without, Paul lingers in profound meditation. He is not at all the Paul whom we knew but a few months ago; through some mysterious influence he seems to have cast off his careless youth, and to have become a grave and thoughtful man.
From the chapel he wanders into the quiet library on the opposite side of a cloister, where the flowers grow in tangle, and a fountain splashes musically night and day, and the birds build and the bees swarm among the blossoms. Now we see him chatting with the Fathers as they stroll up and down in the sunshine; now musing over the graves of the Franciscan Friars who founded the early missions on the Coast; now dreaming in the ruins of the orchard—wandering always apart from the novices and the scholastics, who sometimes regard him curiously as if he were not wholly human but a kind of shadow haunting the place.
His heart grew warm and mellow as he sat by the adobe wall under the red-baked Spanish tiles, richly mossed with age, and contemplated the statue of the Madonna in the trellised shrine overgrown with passion flowers. There were votive offerings of flowers at her feet, and he laid his tribute there from day to day. Neither did he neglect to pay his visit to the shrine of St. Joseph, in the cloister, or St. Anthony of Padua, whom he loved best of all, and whose statue stood under the willows by the great pool of gold fish.
He used to count the hours and the quarter hours as they chimed in the belfry and he was beginning to grow fond of the inexorable routine and to find it passing sweet and restful.
He was unconsciously falling into a mode of life such as he had never known before, and he seemed to feel a growing repugnance to the world without him; how very far away it seemed now! He realized an increasing sense of security so long as he lodged within those gates. His dark robed companions, the amiable Fathers, cheered him, comforted him, strengthened him; and yet when his ghostly father one day sent word to Clitheroe that he desired to see him immediately, and thereupon insisted that the heart-broken boy accompany him to the retreat of his Order, he had no thought other than to offer Paul the change of scene which alone might help to tide the youth over the first crushing pangs of bereavement.
"Give me a week or two of your time," pleaded the good priest—"and I will introduce you to a course of life such as you have never known; it should interest and perhaps benefit you; possibly you may find it delightful. At any rate you must be hastened out of the morbid mood which now possesses you, even if we have to drag you by force."
So Paul went with him, suddenly and in a kind of desperation: his visit was prolonged from day to day, until some weeks had passed. Peace was returning to him—peace such as he had never known before.