The other smiled.
"You have been with me for several years, Fuller," he said, "and your clerical work is very complete. Your investigations, when you are given a definite point to work upon, are also satisfying. But you stop there. I should think that by this time you would have begun to weigh the different problems which come up and reason them out for yourself."
Again Fuller shook his head.
"I've got a pretty good kind of a brain," said he; "people who know have considered me a first-class accountant, and I'm a perfect storehouse for certain kinds of facts. But it's not your kind of brain; for ages of effort would pass and not once would I dream of trying to gain information as to the death of a resident of Eastbury from a parcel of books like these."
"I suppose you are right, my boy," said Ashton-Kirk; "different types of mind have different tendencies." He continued fluttering the leaves of the book, the pale smoke of the cigarette drifting formlessly about him. Then he went on: "Perhaps it does seem rather an extraordinary thing to expect a monk of the thirteenth century to aid in solving the present problem. But let us go further into the matter and we may possibly get some light."
He laid the burnt end in the shell upon the table and rolled another cigarette; and while he did so, he talked.
"Simon Stock was an Englishman, and was a native of Kent. At the age of twelve he is said to have left his home and lived in a hollow tree. The Oriental idea had penetrated the West, and Europe was filled with anchorites. Some monks of the Order of Mount Carmel entered England from the Holy Lands and Simon, now a man of mature years, joined them. There is a legend that he was directed to do so by a supernatural agency, but Catholic scholars seem to pay little attention to this. At any rate time passed and the Kentish man, famous for great piety and virtue, was finally made general of the White Friars, a name by which the Carmelite Order was known.
"Again legend plays its part. As he knelt one day in prayer in his monastery at Cambridge, the Virgin Mary is said to have manifested herself to him and presented him with the scapular."
"I have a sort of hazy notion as to what that is," said Fuller, "but not enough to work on."