"It is banishing me from you," said Antonio, with prompt gallantry.
"If you wish to see me again—though I can't think why you should," she said, in as colorless a tone as she could command, "don't always come in the afternoon, or to the house. Mrs. Baxter will drive you mad. Come in the morning, to the ravine—that pretty pool with the cascade and the stepping-stones. I shall be there reading on fine days. It's a shame to pen you up in a stuffy house. Besides, you said it was your favorite spot. Mrs. Baxter is calling. Good-bye."
II
When Isabel reached the pool with the stepping-stones Antonio was already there. He could have wished that Miss Kaye-Templeman had not suggested what might look like surreptitious meetings; but, being a Portuguese gentleman as well as a monk, he could do no other than attend her at the place she had appointed.
It was a perfect morning. The sun shone more hotly and brightly than on many a day of July, making one thankful for the shade of the trees, and for the cold spray of the waterfall. Hundreds of birds were singing, and a great Japanese medlar scented the air. Yet, after half an hour or so of uneasy talk on commonplace topics, the monk turned home again with a smarting breast.
Somehow the lady gave him a feeling that he had intruded; that he had committed an indelicacy in so swiftly taking her at her word; and that he was beginning to bore her. The afternoon, before, on the top of the steps, she had seemed sorry to see him go; but, at the stepping-stones, she seemed rather to regret his having come. While her politeness was unexceptionable, their good-comradeship appeared to be at an end.
His failure to retain her favor piqued Antonio. Like many another monk before him, he had often found pleasure in the belief that, if need arose, he could hold his own as a man of the world. Nor did the pleasantness of such a belief spring altogether from sinful pride. He had sought to hallow God's name and to hasten the coming of the Kingdom by sacrificing his share of life's delights and excitements; and he naturally preferred to think that the world he had renounced was a world in which he would have triumphed, and not a world in which he would have blundered and failed. The first eventful days which followed the arrival of all these English people at the abbey had ministered so subtly to his complacency that the awakening was all the ruder. Beneath the surface of his monkish humility the natural man began to stir proudly and imperiously towards the regaining of his dominance.
The next day was Sunday. So as to save the faces of poor Magarida and her family, Antonio avoided the ten o'clock crowd and fulfilled his obligation at the seven o'clock low Mass. This was the Mass most favored of the local Saints and Blessed Ones; but although the cura and the worshipers were full of quiet devotion the monk found it hard to keep his thoughts from wandering. Nearly all the way home Isabel tripped daintily hither and thither before his mind's eyes. He soon decided that he must not present himself again either at pool or at guest-house for a day or two; but this resolution only enhanced the dreariness of his mood.
Reaching the farm about nine o'clock he was about to prepare his lonely breakfast when José appeared with a letter. It had been brought, he said, by Sir Percy's Portuguese servant, whom José proceeded to denounce as an inquisitive minx and a saucy chatterbox. Antonio broke the seal and read: