Father Adrian smiled scornfully. "I was not bound to Cruta," he answered. "There had been complaints, and I was there to investigate them. The monastery was poverty and disease-stricken. It is closed now forever."
"Then you are no monk?"
Father Adrian shook his head. "I am, and I am not. In my youth I served my novitiate, but I never took the oaths. The cloisters are for holier men than I."
"Then who are you?"
"I am—Father Adrian, priest of the Roman Catholic Church, I can tell you no more."
The moonlight was falling full upon his dark, striking face. Paul, with bent brows, scanned every feature of it intently. Father Adrian bore the scrutiny without flinching and without discomposure. Only once the colour mounted a little into his cheeks as the eyes of the two men met.
"What brings you to Vaux Abbey, Father Adrian?" Paul asked at length.
"To see your home," was the quiet reply.
"What do you want with me? It must be something more than curiosity which has brought you all this way. What is it?"
Father Adrian was silent. Yet his silence was not one of confusion. He was looking down through the gaps in the ruined chapel walls at the dark Gothic front of the old Abbey. Paul waited for an answer, and it came at last.