"Sweet girl! I quite agree with you. She's much too small for large sins. And I've never seen her with valuable jewels. Dear Mr. Welbourne, your advice is as always so excellent. Ever since we met here you have been a second father to me."
The thin man sighed. It is a sweet and seemly thing to be the father of a charming and lovely young woman, but only when one is too old for other relationships. It occurred to him that it might be wise to shave; a beard sometimes gives a false appearance of age. The patriarchs wore beards, while Greek gods, with the exception of Zeus, are mostly represented as beardless. No one ever heard of a bearded angel. Only yesterday Miss Boundrish had wondered publicly and at the top of her voice why Mr. Welbourne "had never married," and he had replied very meekly that it was not his custom to do anything in a hurry; upon which Miss Boundrish's mother had encouragingly cited the case of a cousin's uncle on the other side, who had married at eighty-five.
It was while Mr. Welbourne was sighing and meditating on his own beard and the probable extent of her pecuniary difficulties that Ermengarde, who, with his helping hand had just climbed up among the twisted roots of some pines to the height on which the monastery was built, caught sight of the figure of a stranger. He was pacing the broad and level walk beneath the cypresses, outside the building, where the ridge was highest, and whence the outlook over mountain gorges on one hand and capes and headlands running out to sea on the other was widest and of most varied beauty. It was a tall, thin, black figure in a hooded cloak, with a clean-shaven, ascetic face bent over the book he carried and was perusing with devout interest.
"Surely," she said, stopping to rest on the low, crumbling wall by the steps leading on to this plateau—"surely that must be one of the expelled monks, or his ghost, come back to the old home. Reading his breviary."
Mr. Welbourne found a seat on the wall beside her, carefully avoiding a geranium-bush, that had grown up to the top among the broken stones, and gave out a delicate scent where Ermengarde's skirt swept it.
"No," he said, looking at the studious figure, "it is not a monk. I doubt if the book he is studying with such devout interest is a book of hours—or a psalter."
"An interesting type—pale, worn, emaciated, deep-set eyes, a keen, subtle face—the true ascetic type. What stories that face could tell," she mused aloud—"that is, the mouth."
"Well, yes; it has told a few thumpers to my certain knowledge. No, it is not a monk, Mrs. Allonby. It is only Mr. Mosson."
"You know him? How interesting!"
"Oh, everybody knows Mr. Mosson—everybody who has come to grief, that is."