BOOK V

ISABEL

I

A chariot was at the guest-house door when Antonio called to enquire about Sir Percy's progress. At the horses' heads stood Jackson waiting. Rugs, portmanteaux, and a brass-clamped trunk had already been strapped in their places.

"H'llo!" sang out young Crowberry's light voice from the top of the steps. "You're the very man we were coming to see. We were coming to say good-bye."

"You and your father?"

"I and my father and Sir Percy. We're off to Lisbon. The doctor from Navares was here all yesterday afternoon. Seemed rather clever. He liked the way you'd dressed the hand; but he doesn't like Sir Percy's general health, especially his heart. So the guv'nor and I are taking him to the chief Lisbon doctor. We shall go to Oporto by sea next week--the guv'nor and I--and from there to London."

He descended the bottom step; and, after marching off Antonio by the arm to a spot out of Jackson's hearing, he added:

"Don't get the idea that I repent of helping to save the azulejos. We did the right thing. All the same, I'm not happy about it. In a sense we're to blame for Sir Percy's burnt hand. Hang it, he's a brick, after all! I couldn't stand pain like that. He doesn't give a single moan. But it isn't Sir Percy who upsets me most. It's Isabel. I said she was all head and no heart. By Jove, think of it! No heart! Yet she's hardly left his bedside these twenty-four hours. She waits on him hand and foot; and sometimes the look in her eyes is just about as much as I can stand."

"This Isabel certainly has a heart," said Antonio. "If she's unlike other people, it's because she has more heart, not less. I hope the Senhorita will not be fatigued by her journey to Lisbon."

"She isn't going."

"Not going? You don't intend to leave these ladies alone?"

"No. We're leaving them in charge of a friend. Besides, there'll be Jackson."

"The friend is a man?"

"Quite. He's a man from top to toe. His name is Francisco Manoel Oliveira da Rocha."

Before the monk could reply, they were joined by Mr. Crowberry, to whom Jackson had announced Antonio's arrival.

"You're welcome, da Rocha," he said heartily. "This will save us an hour. We were meaning to call and see you on our way to Lisbon. Teddy has told you the news. We want you to be as neighborly as you can to the ladies. It will only be for eight or nine days."

"I shall be happy to serve the Senhoras," answered Antonio.

"Happy? So you ought to be. But you don't look it. Come, damn it all, what did you tell me yourself? The worst of the year's work is over; and you said you were going to study. My advice is ... Don't. Give yourself a rest. Run up here of an evening for a bit of music or a game of cribbage."

"Or for a quiet pipe and glass with that Excellent Creature Mrs. Baxter," put in young Edward.

"Do the Senhoras approve of this?" asked Antonio.

"We didn't ask 'em," Mr. Crowberry answered. "But never fear. They'll jump at it."

"And Sir Percy?"

"He approves of you entirely. Y' see, da Rocha, I've been giving you glowing testimonials. I've said that if I were the Grand Turk himself I would trust you with the latch-key of the harem. I don't doubt though," added Mr. Crowberry, chuckling and digging at Antonio's ribs, "that you've been a bit of a dog in your time. Eh? And none the worse for it either. Still, the point is you're as steady as an old horse, now. Besides, supposing you wanted to make love to Isabel, it would be all the same. You'd simply get a frost-bite."

"I am entirely at the service of all your Excellencies," said Antonio, rather stiffly.

"Thanks," Mr. Crowberry answered. "But don't be too much at the service of Mrs. Baxter. Between ourselves, she's a selfish, lazy, avaricious old humbug. She looks the picture of good temper; but don't be taken in. Mrs. Baxter boasts that she has stuck to the Kaye-Templemans through thick and thin; but she's buttered her own bread thick all the time. She is a rich woman--all out of Sir Percy. When the ship begins to sink, Mrs. Baxter'll be the first to rat."

"Then how must I treat her?" Antonio asked.

"Simply leave her alone. She'll spend her days in bed, like a dormouse--only, dormice don't wake up every four hours to ask if it isn't feeding-time. Even while Sir Percy has been in all this pain, Mrs. Baxter has had the servants running about after her the same as usual."

"What about Jackson?"

"Oh, he'll sleep all day too. He'll find a snug corner and smoke and dose till dinner-time. But he doesn't soak. And, if there's work to do, he'll do it. Jackson's all right. But come inside."

On the threshold of the large room Isabel met them. Want of sleep had paled her cheeks and dulled her eyes; but an unwonted softness of expression made her more beautiful in the monk's view than ever before. He could not help feeling glad that she was remaining behind, and proud that she was to be in his charge. Isabel led Antonio straight to Sir Percy, who was sitting in a rocking-chair with his arm in a sling.

The baronet was more changed than his daughter. He looked weak and old; but he was no longer distraught. After he had answered Antonio's inquiries gratefully, he said:

"Senhor da Rocha, it is possible I have behaved towards you with curtness or even with downright uncouthness. If so, I ask your pardon most sincerely, and I beg you to set it all down to my preoccupation with a scheme which has failed. My daughter and I will never forget your kindness. Indeed, we are about to presume still further upon it. You know that I shall be absent a few days in Lisbon, and we are hoping that you will be so very good as to come now and then to this house."

It seemed strange to Antonio. But he reflected that the English were strange people, and that Sir Percy was far stranger than most of his compatriots. Again he reflected that neither Sir Percy nor Mr. Crowberry, in spite of their friendliness, regarded him as other than a simple farmer who would never cease to be conscious of their differences of station. Accordingly he replied:

"Far from asking me a service, your Excellency, on the contrary, is doing me a great honor. I value it so much that he may take his journey with an easy mind."

Jackson brought in two bottles of tawny port, bearing the familiar label of Castro and de Mattos. Healths were drunk all round; and although Sir Percy, Isabel and Antonio did not drink more than two full glasses between them, the bottles were quickly emptied. Farewells were said. Then Sir Percy was placed in the carriage, with Crowberry _père_ at his side. Crowberry _fils_ climbed upon the box, accompanied by the Portuguese groom, who had come with the party from Oporto. At Sir Percy's suggestion, Antonio took the vacant seat opposite Mr. Crowberry, so that he should save his legs a mile of the journey home. Before entering the carriage, however, the monk turned to Isabel and enquired:

"At what hours will my visits be least unacceptable to the Senhoras?"

"Come up this afternoon," cried Mr. Crowberry, emphatically. "It'll be to-day they'll feel loneliest, when all we noisy nuisances are gone. To-day and to-morrow."

"But you need sleep?" said Antonio to Isabel. He intended to express no more than his genuine solicitude; but his soft eyes met hers with another glance of unconscious tenderness. She colored so noticeably that he made haste to add: "So I will not come until four o'clock."

Standing on tiptoe beside the chariot Isabel gave her father a single kiss. It was plain that such outward marks of affection were not often exchanged between them, and that the public giving and taking of this one kiss meant more than a thousand kisses between less reserved beings. Even young Crowberry seemed to notice it, as though he had eyes in his back; for he cracked a whip, and the chariot lurched on its way.

At four o'clock Antonio found Mrs. Baxter waiting in state to receive him. Although the light blue silk dress into which she had packed herself for the occasion made the Excellent Creature look almost as broad as long, she was not a wholly unpleasing body. Her hair, primly parted in the middle, and drawn tightly over her temples, was still glossy and black. Her insistent smile showed white and regular teeth, and the color in her cheeks gave her a buxom and wholesome look in odd contrast with her hypochondriac complaints. She wore a very large oval brooch containing a lock of hair which, presumably, had pertained to the lamented Baxter; also gold ear-rings and a fine gold chain.

It soon became evident that Mr. Crowberry had been descanting upon Antonio's importance; for Mrs. Baxter was determined to convince the visitor of her own past greatness. She monopolized the conversation. Beginning with an account of a happy girlhood spent amidst every luxury in a part of England unnamed, she went on to speak of her rashly romantic marriage with the dashing ne'er-do-well Baxter; or her universally-envied beauty as a bride; of her tearing her veil in church, and of her coming out in a gust of rain to find a black cat sitting on the vicar's first wife's gravestone--three infallible portents of evil. Next, of the handsome, but unpractical, Baxter's prompt and inconsiderate demise; of the un-Christian obduracy of her flint-hearted father, who would neither forgive nor finance his headstrong offspring; and of the entirely diabolical behavior of the surviving Baxters.

Up to this point Isabel had sat bending over some embroidery, with an air of finding all such work distasteful; but when the Excellent Creature began putting the finishing touches to her character-sketch of the late Miss Caroline Sophia Baxter, she got up unostentatiously and went softly to the window. Mrs. Baxter did not mind, but proceeded to praise the admirable Providence which had suddenly thrown her into the path of dear Lady Kaye-Templeman. A hundred details followed, and Antonio's eye began to rove. Nor did it rove vainly; for when Mrs. Baxter explained how she and dear Lady Kaye-Templeman had grown to be practically two sisters, the monk saw the slender girl in the window tap the floor impatiently with her small foot.

"Of course, I was with her at the end," said Mrs. Baxter, mopping away tears. "How could I have been anywhere else? Her last thoughts were of her darling child. 'Clara,' she said to me, 'promise me that you will never desert my Isabel.'"

The small foot tapped more sharply.

"And I never _have_ deserted her," concluded the Excellent Creature, "although families of the highest quality and the first respectability have sought to induce me, by the most tempting offers, to enter their establishments. No, Signor, I've never deserted poor Isabel, and, until she is dead or married, I never will."

"There are clouds coming up from the Atlantic," said Isabel, turning round abruptly. "Mrs. Baxter, we must either lose the pleasure of Mr. da Rocha's company, or else let him be soaked through."

Filled with a deep dread of the dreary half-hour when, having recited her own history, she must listen to another's, Mrs. Baxter was relieved to see Antonio go. The Iberian flourishes which adorned his parting compliments completed her satisfaction. Why had no one ever spoken so nicely to her in England? She shook hands with Antonio, and very graciously pressed him to come and drink tea as soon as he should be able.

Isabel accompanied him to the top of the stone steps.

"I'm so sorry," she said.

"Sorry?"

"About Mrs. Baxter. No! Don't say anything insincere. I know as well as you do that you hated it as much as I did. I could put up with the tale when it was half truth and half white lies. But it has changed with every telling until it's nearly all jet-black fibs. My mother liked her poor friends more than her rich ones; but Mrs. Baxter was not her friend. Nor is Mrs. Baxter's name Clara. It is plain Jane."

Antonio smiled. "Anyhow, I've got it over," he said. "It had to come, some time or other. But where are your clouds that are going to drench me to the skin?"

"Over there," answered Isabel, pointing to one tiny milk-white cirrus adrift in the clear blue lake of heaven. "It's as large as a man's hand. You think I'm irreligious; but I've read the Bible, and I remember something about a cloud no bigger than a man's hand which worked some miracle."

"That little cloud delivered Israel from drought and from famine," said Antonio.

"And this little cloud has delivered you from Mrs. Baxter and from ... me," she retorted.

"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:

_Mrs. Baxter presents her compliments to Signor da Rocha and requests the pleasure of his company to-morrow (Sunday) afternoon, for tea. Mrs. B. trusts that Signor R. reached home yesterday before the shower._

_Saturday Evening._

Underneath Mrs. Baxter's expansive script the monk saw a few infinitesimal characters, so minute that in spite of his keen eyes he was forced to hold them up to the light. At first they looked like a wavy and broken line, about half an inch long; but he deciphered them at last. They ran:

_Do come. I. K-T._

"For instance," said José indignantly. "She asked me point-blank, plump out, whether your Worship is engaged to be married."

Antonio wheeled round so sharply that he almost let the paper fall. It took him some moments to realize that José was not quoting Isabel, but only Isabel's servant.

"I up and asked her, straight off, if she was engaged to be married herself," continued José. "And when she said No, I said, 'With a tongue like that I don't wonder at it.' Then she went home."

Antonio forced a laugh and turned back to light a couple of pine-cones on the hearth. But when José had set out for church he picked up the note again and read Isabel's message thrice over. Only nine letters; yet they harped and sang around him as if they had been the Nine Muses, and all his heaviness and dreariness fled away from their silver voices.

Later on, while he was conning his breviary under the orange-trees, the monk suddenly faced a question. It came to him as he recited the None psalm _Quomodo dilexi legem_, at the words _tota die meditatio mea est_. Could he truthfully say that his "meditation all day long" was still upon God? He examined his conscience.

The result was not unsatisfactory. After years of loneliness his mind surely needed the tonic of intercourse with minds of its own order. Mr. Crowberry and his son had certainly wrecked his plan of autumn meditation and study; but after all, these two were associated with the most crowded and stirring months of Antonio's career, and he could hardly be cool at their irruption into the quiet life of the farm. Again, the affair of the azulejos had distracted him greatly; but surely God had been the substratum of his long thinkings, and the firmament overarching them all. As for Isabel, he was spending time with her at Sir Percy's express request. That he should find delight in her society was proper and right. As a da Rocha, whose ancestors had fought against the Moors to establish the Portuguese kingdom and against the Spaniards to restore it, he naturally felt invigorated by his encounters with a gently bred and high-born damsel.

Although he was perfectly honest in all this inward searching, the monk, nevertheless, failed to push the probe right home. Isabel had been confided to his neighborly good-will, Isabel was intellectual, Isabel spoke his beloved English, Isabel was an aristocrat, like himself; therefore Isabel's temporary prominence in his thoughts was explained. It did not occur to him that Isabel was also the prettiest and daintiest girl he had ever seen, and that this fact might have some little to do with his interest in her. But he was not wholly to blame for the omission. Barely ten days had passed since his escape from Margarida, and Antonio was taking it for fully granted that he was eternally proof against girls as girls and women as women.

When José came in from church the monk translated Mrs. Baxter's note aloud, and stated that he would accept the invitation. He added that he would take care to pass the chapel, and, if possible, to collect the pieces of the two broken azulejos. The two men sat awhile in the garden smoking their Sunday cigars and saying little. José's peace of mind was evidently not being disturbed by Sir Percy's daughter as it had been disturbed by Senhor Jorge's. After his master had refused a plump, bouncing, rosy-cheeked, black-eyed heiress, all covered with gold, like Margarida, José did not fear his accepting a slender, icy, shell-pink, simply-garbed, unbejeweled stranger like Miss Kaye-Templeman. He would almost as soon have believed that Antonio was in danger of Mrs. Baxter.

The monk set out at three o'clock. Instead of taking his usual short cut up the bed of the torrent he followed the road through the great gates and the avenue of camellias to the monastery. He tried the door of the chapel; but it was locked. Deeply disappointed, he was turning away when Isabel came in sight, descending the steep path from the pool. She greeted him with more openness and friendliness than ever before.

"I've come to meet you," she added, "to save my own life. Whatever happens, don't let Mrs. Baxter know I wrote that little bit on her letter. She gave it to me to seal."

"It was wrong of you," said Antonio, with mock censoriousness.

"I know. Very wrong," she retorted. "But Mrs. Baxter began it. After her Mrs. B. and Signor R., surely there had to be a postscript. But tell me. Didn't I see you rattling the door of the chapel?"

"I hoped it might be unlocked," he said, a little awkwardly, "and I thought I might take the liberty of picking up those broken tiles. Perhaps they could be patched together and cemented back into their places."

The thought of the azulejos clouded her gaiety, and she did not dissemble an impatient pout. Antonio drew out his old-fashioned silver watch.

"Twenty-five minutes past three," he said. "We are too early for Mrs. Baxter."

"For Mrs. B., you mean," she answered, dismissing her impatience. "Very well, Signor R.; let us go and gather up the fragments."

From her embroidered bag she drew out a tiny handkerchief, a set of ivory tablets, and, last of all, a long thin key. The monk recognized it at once. It was of old Spanish work, damascened; and Antonio could not doubt that if the Fazenda official had been a less ignorant man he would have ordered a cheap duplicate, so as to keep the original for himself. Isabel drove it into the keyhole; and, a moment later, the well-hung door rolled back on its hinges and the afternoon sun filled the chapel with warm light.

They entered. Nothing had been touched since the moment of Sir Percy's accident. Without a word the monk stepped forward and began putting together the broken framework of the saw. After some hesitation Isabel joined him. Kneeling near his side she sorted out the shattered azulejos and succeeded fairly well in piecing them together.

"What shall we do with them?" she asked. "We have no cement. Besides, I am not sure that my father won't prefer to put them back himself. By the way, don't tell Mrs. Baxter what we've been doing."

"Give them to me," Antonio answered. And, having transferred them to a short plank, he carried the pieces off to his own cell and placed them in the cupboard. The damage to the two tiles was irreparable; but he resolved to puzzle out the secret of their manufacture and to make new ones in their stead.

"We can go now, can't we?" begged Isabel, when he returned to the chapel. There was a dutiful, almost daughterly, submissiveness in her manner which cooed to his pride more softly and winsomely than he knew.

"We can go," he said. "There will be time to take the path over the stepping-stones."

They relocked the chapel and mounted through the wood. Here and there its brown carpet of pine-needles was tawny with flecks and dapplings of mellow sunshine. In a patch of old garden, round an image of Saint Scholastica, they found autumn snowdrops, saffron, and sweet-smelling ranunculus. Overhead a blue gum-tree was in full flower, and all the while the wood hummed and thrilled with the diapason of the hidden torrent.

After they had crossed the stepping-stones Isabel halted, as if to absorb the loveliness of the rippling pool. Antonio remained silent, awaiting her good pleasure. Suddenly she said, without turning her eyes towards his:

"This is the place where I was so disagreeable yesterday morning."

He was too much surprised to reply.

"Isn't it?" she demanded.

"No," said Antonio. "It is the place, where, yesterday morning, we ... where we didn't get on together as well as before."

"It was all my fault," she persisted. "I had a silly fit of prudishness, like a young miss just home from school. All the time we were trying to talk I was wondering what you thought of me for asking you to meet me alone in a wood."

"English ways are different from Portuguese," suggested Antonio.

"Not so very different, after all," she said. "Ask Mrs. Baxter. Or, rather, take care that you don't say half a word to Mrs. Baxter about it. If you do she will swoon away with horror at the news of my brazen forwardness."

"If you will lend me your little ivory tablets," replied Antonio, "I shall be able to begin making notes of all the things I am not to mention before Mrs. Baxter."

"Be serious for a minute," she urged with a heightening of color. "Unless I can make you understand, we must not meet this way any more. If we mustn't, if we can't, I don't expect it will matter very much to you; but ... it will to me."

Her eyes met Antonio's. This time it was he who colored up and fell into confusion. The only reply he could think of was a stilted compliment.

"The Senhorita does me a great and an undeserved honor," he stammered.

"Don't," she commanded, with an impatient gesture. "When you talk like that I hate you. Be sincere. Besides, I'm not a Senhorita. If I were a Senhorita I should have jet-black hair and big sentimental eyes, and I should never walk more than a mile in my life, and I should no more dream of meeting you like this than of dancing on a boa-constrictor. Are you going to talk like that any more? If so, we'll go home this minute and you can do it on the way."

Antonio had met his match. If Isabel had been a man he could have met imperiousness with imperiousness, sarcasm with sarcasm, demand with demand, until he had established his will. But Isabel mastered him. He could only stand before her, like a refined and handsome José, awaiting orders.

"What you must understand is this," she said. "You have promised to come and talk to me now and then, while my father is in Lisbon. You've promised, and I want you to do it. I must talk to somebody sometimes, mustn't I? But I'd rather not have you at all than have any more times like Friday afternoon with Mrs. Baxter. You may think that, because she finished the story of her life on Friday, you've got the worst of it over; but you haven't. You've still to hear about the dear Marchioness of Witheringfield. Mrs. Baxter didn't know the dear Marchioness from Eve; but the tale will take an hour, all the same. Also, you've to hear how Mrs. Baxter lost the Baxter jewels, which she never possessed; and how she undermined her health nursing me through a month's fever, though it was really only a two-days' cold in the head; and how she rescued the little Viscount Datton from a burning house, which she never saw in her life. Don't think me spiteful. I simply can't stand it. Of course, you must put up with Mrs. Baxter once in a while; but, speaking generally, if you're coming any more to talk to me, I want you to talk to me here, at this pool, in the mornings."

"If I come here, to this pool, in the mornings," asked Antonio, who had recovered himself, "how do you know that I shan't inflict on you a string of histories as long as Mrs. Baxter's?"

Although he did not mean to fish for a compliment, his ears expected some pleasing reply; and he was a little crestfallen when she replied brusquely:

"Perhaps you will. Only don't you see, they will be histories I haven't heard fifty times already. Come to-morrow morning. Now we ought to be going. It must be close on four o'clock."

III

The next morning Isabel and Antonio conversed, to the accompaniment of the cascade's deep music, for nearly an hour. The morning following, their talk lasted eighty minutes. On the Wednesday Antonio again drank tea with Mrs. Baxter, who regaled him with the full story of the little Viscount Datton's escape from the blaze at Datton Towers; of his lordship's ingratitude and eventual marriage; and of the young Viscountess Datton's scandalous callousness when her consort broke his collar-bone in a steeple-chase. On the Friday morning the monk met Isabel again at the pool. Business took him to Villa Branca on the Saturday; but Sunday afternoon saw him striding over the stepping-stones once more.

Although these sunny hours were seasons of delight and refreshment to Antonio's human spirit, they did not parch the springs of his Christly life. Every night he continued the pious practice of self-examination; and he was able, in all honesty and reverence, to justify himself by the example of his Lord. _Diligebat Jesus Martham et sororem ejus Mariam_, "Jesus loved Martha and her sister Mary;" and, on the eve of His passion he fortified His weary spirit for the last conflict by abiding quietly in Martha's and Mary's house. And, in this sense--_diligebat not amabat_--Antonio loved Isabel. He was drawn to her by silken cords of pity for a loneliness and lovelessness far worse than his own. He loved, with a fine spiritual sympathy unwarped by earthly passion, the brave, truthful ardent soul underneath the ice of her pride. No doubt he found a sensuous pleasure in the softness of her voice, in her ever-varying beauty, and in her never-failing grace; but these charms delighted him by reason of an exquisite fitness, like the fitness of richly embroidered vestments and pure golden chalices or monstrances in great acts of spiritual worship. He loved her with a sacred and not with a profane love.

Nevertheless, the monk knew that he was only a weak mortal, and that he had drifted into a situation rife with perils. He remembered that better Christians than he had made shipwreck of their faith through yielding themselves too confidently to feminine companionship. He recalled the solemn warning of Saint Paul: "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." But, so far as his own safety was concerned, a single consideration sufficed to reassure him. In a few days Sir Percy would return, and it was almost certain that he would bid his women-folk pack their chattels and depart before the second instalment of purchase-money fell due. Within a month, perhaps within a week, Isabel would pass out of Antonio's life. Once more he would have to settle down with José to their dull and lonesome grind, and probably years would drag away before he could hear an English voice again.

Antonio, however, was not selfish enough to think only of his own salvation and perfection. The situation had its perils for Isabel as well as for himself; and therefore he followed up his monk's self-examination by meditating, as a man of the world, on Isabel's interests. Although he would miss her sorely, Antonio was prepared to surrender her, when the time came, without a murmur, as he had learned to surrender many lesser delights before; but was Isabel equally able and willing to surrender Antonio? She was young, she was lonely, she was deeply affectionate as only a reserved woman can be; so was he doing right in occupying her thoughts more and more? After striving to act like the very soul of honor towards the slow-witted and shallow Margarida, was he not in danger of behaving dishonorably towards this finely-tempered, deep-hearted lady?

These questions suddenly pressed themselves upon his conscience with so much ardor as he was crossing the stepping-stones on the second Sunday afternoon that he halted in the midst of the spray from the cascade and almost resolved to turn back. But he decided that there was no cause for alarm. In Isabel's view the difference in their stations must surely repress any rash outgoings of her maiden fancy. The da Rochas could boast a longer and a less dubitable pedigree than the Kaye-Templemans; but Antonio had perceived among the English a disrespect for all aristocracies save their own. Besides, Isabel knew not a leaf or a twig of his family tree. To her he was a self-made man, a yeoman working with his own hands. Educated, traveled, interesting, ambitious, refined he might be; but, in the social scale, he was still a yeoman before the eyes of Isabel.

No. Surely there was no peril, no need to turn back. At not one of their meetings by the pool-side had there been the slightest approach to sentimental interchanges. They had talked of a hundred matters. Portuguese, English, and universal, and Isabel had gone so far as to tell a score or two of intimate experiences from which Antonio could rebuild the gray history of her unpeaceful life. But there had been no more personal explanations, no more half-quarrels, no more uncontrolled glances or blushes, no more of anything outside the frank good-fellowship of fast friends in the first flush of friendship. So Antonio did not turn back.

Isabel appeared at last, holding out some papers. A post had arrived from Lisbon, bringing the news that Sir Percy was much better. As the burnt hand was still useless, Mr. Crowberry had written out the bulletin; and, enclosed with his letter to Isabel were two for Antonio. The first, from Crowberry _père_, contained little more than compliments and thanks; but the second, in the loose handwriting of Crowberry _fils_, was more interesting. It ran:

_Dear Joligoodfellow._

_IhopethiswillfindyouwellasitleavesmeatpresentthankGodforit._

_Now that the alujezos (or ajuzelos, or azelujos) are safe, isn't it time you took a holiday? Why not come back to England with Sir Percy and Isabel? I don't expect they'll stay in Portugal._

_I will bet a guinea that you've either quarreled with Isabel or that you haven't. When you write, don't forget to say what you really think of her._

_Give my love to that Excellent Creature Mrs. Baxter. Also to the Baxter jewels. Also to those monsters of ingratitude, inhumanity, and impiety Miss Sophia Baxter and the Viscount and Viscountess Datton. Also, if you dare, to Isabel. And accept the same yourself from_

_Your most respectful and obedient_ TEDDY CROWBERRY.

It occurred to Antonio that in neither of the letters was a date given for Sir Percy's return to the guest-house. He was on the point of asking Isabel whether it was mentioned in Mr. Crowberry's bulletin; but he saw that the question could be interpreted in an uncouth sense, and therefore he did not put it. The answer, however, was writ plain in Isabel's face. He swiftly analyzed her cheerfulness into two principal components--her thankfulness for Sir Percy's improved health and her relief at the prolongation of her liberty. Isabel's laugh was more free and gay. She seemed to be more of a girl and less of a woman. Indeed, for a few minutes, she became almost a child. For a while she stood hurling stones into the heart of the waterfall, as into the white down and iridescent feathers of a great bird's breast; and as soon as she wearied of this exercise she began to sail boats of cork-bark down the hurrying waters of the pool, scolding or encouraging her favorite as if it had been alive.

When Isabel at last sat down she demanded, with her usual abruptness:

"Why have you never told me about the Portuguese ladies--about the senhoritas? I'm tired of Dom Miguel and Dom Pedro, and Affonso Henriques and the Cardinal-King. As for growing grapes, by this time I know as much about it as you do. Talk to me about the senhoritas."

"What can I say about them," objected Antonio, "except that they are exceedingly beautiful, exceedingly virtuous, and exceedingly charming."

"And exceedingly dull," she said. "But be serious. Answer me. Is it true that Portuguese men are only half Christians? Is it true that, where women are concerned, you are out-and-out Moors? Don't you all look on women either as toys or as slaves?"

"If young Mr. Crowberry were here," retorted Antonio, "he would tell you how we tie up the ladies of our harems in sacks and drop them into the Tagus."

"I'm glad young Mr. Crowberry is hundreds of miles away," she declared. "When I've the patience to listen to him, I admit some of his satire is clever. But he bores me. I mean, he annoys me. I suppose it's because we've both got yellow hair."

"You have not got yellow hair," said Antonio.

"Never mind what sort of hair I've got. Tell me about the senhoritas. How do they spend their time?"

"Perhaps they could answer themselves--though I doubt it," he said. "People say they eat and drink and sleep; they dress and go to church; and, the rest of the time, they look out of the window."

"Is it still true," she asked, "that their ... their suitors come and stand under the windows at night, for hours at a time, with guitars?"

"Not always with guitars," explained Antonio, "but the rest is still true. If you want a senhorita you must stand under her window, night after night, for months, wet or fine. When her window is on the third floor you get a crick in the neck."

"But what do they talk about?"

"Nothing. They make eyes."

Her questions ceased, and the monk hoped that they were finished with a risky topic. Suddenly, however, she turned upon him and blurted out:

"Do you have to crick your neck for Margarida?"

Antonio jumped. The question struck him entirely dumb. Margarida! At first he could only stare at the questioner blankly. Then his stung pride made itself felt. The blank stare gave place to a flash of indignation. Her eyes quailed before the angry fires in his.

"No," he said, slowly and coldly. "I do not have to crick my neck for Margarida."

Isabel's face showed that she was troubled and almost frightened at what she had done. But he made no haste to condone her offense. He was capable of forgiving the injury almost as soon as it was committed; but he could not so easily surmount his disappointment at hearing anything like indelicacy from her lips. Graver still was this sudden revelation that Isabel did, after all, think thoughts of him as a lover and a marrying man. And it gradually dawned upon him that there had been something nervous in her gaiety from the moment of her bringing the Crowberry's letters. He understood at last that she had come determined to probe him with her sudden question.

He got up and moved away a few yards to a point from which he could see the Atlantic; and there he stood, taking scrupulous counsel with himself. Was it or was it not his duty to make a fresh draft upon the candor with which he had ended the match-making of Senhor Jorge? No. It was not. Yet something had to be done. What hint ought he to drop, or what counter-stroke ought he to deliver? For one foolish half-moment he almost entertained a mean plan of letting Isabel believe that there was indeed something between himself and Margarida.

"I am so sorry," murmured a soft and penitent voice almost in his ear.

After long indecision he asked, in dry tones and without turning to look at her:

"What made you say it?"

Her pause was longer than his. At length she answered:

"It wasn't idle curiosity."

"Then what was it?"

"I hardly know. Only it ... It seemed so dreadful."

"Dreadful?"

"I mean," she explained hastily, "it would be dreadful if you made a marriage like that. To say so is unpardonable impertinence on my part, no doubt. But, to be perfectly frank, I ... well, I suppose I've idealized you a little. You're not like other people I've met. And it shocked me to think of you settling down and, so to speak, giving up the fight."

"What fight?" asked the monk, not willing to help her out.

"Fight is the wrong word. Never mind. You know what I mean. Of course, this Margarida is good and domesticated and she'll make some farmer or tradesman an excellent wife. But can she read or write? Has she more than three ideas in her head? Could she talk with you, or understand you, or even sympathize with you, in anything that matters?"

"I suppose she could," said Antonio. "The simple things of life are the things that matter."

"To simple people, certainly. But you are not simple. You are complicated. Your teeth are easily set on edge. You are sentimental, romantic."

"I am sentimental? I am romantic?" he echoed, with an unfree incredulous laugh. "You are the first to find it out."

"It's true, all the same. What about that shut-up dismal monastery down there? Haven't you woven more romance around it than any ladye ever wove around her dead knight? What about the azulejos? Aren't you you as sentimental over them as any love-sick youth over a withered rose or a lock of hair? Why, you were ready to quarrel with us all, your old friends included, for the sake of a sentimental memory."

"Tell me," the monk demanded, turning to read her eyes, "what do you know about Margarida? What have you heard? Who has been talking to you?"

She was silent.

"From whom have you heard Margarida's name?" he insisted.

"You will think very badly of me," she confessed. "I heard it from Fisher, my maid. Oh, yes! look scandalized by all means. I don't care. The poor girl is in exile. Joanninha, our Portuguese cook, doesn't know much English, and she's old enough to be Fisher's mother. Mrs. Baxter never speaks to Fisher except to scold her or order her about. If I didn't let her chatter now and again to me, she'd go mad. Not that I listen to half she says; but I should be telling you a downright lie if I pretended that I didn't prick up my ears when she began about you and Margarida."

"What did she say?"

"Very little. Only that Joanninha had been gossiping in the village shop, and that somebody had said something about the Senhor Oliveira da Rocha marrying this Margarida."

Antonio relapsed into moody silence. The news that his name was still being linked with Margarida's filled him with chagrin, if only for the sake of Senhor Jorge and his family. When, however, his thoughts came back to Isabel he softened. He saw no reason for doubting that she was disinterested in dreading the disaster of his union with an unlettered and unintelligent country lass, and he was unconsciously flattered by her generous recognition of his finer temperament. Isabel, waiting at his elbow like a repentant child, felt the softening; and, plucking up fresh courage, she said:

"You haven't told me yet if it is true. You've only told me that you don't crick your neck."

"Which do you think?" asked the monk rather sharply. "Do you believe this gossip or not?"

"I don't," she replied, without hesitation. "But ... there's just one thing that might make me credit it."

"What is it?"

"Well. This Margarida is certainly very pretty. She has an adorable color and wonderful eyes, and she wears her mantilla beautifully. Besides--"

"But you've never seen her," interrupted Antonio in alarm.

"Yes, I have. This morning. In church. At Mass. Why weren't you there? I thought you were obliged to go. I went with Joanninha. Don't ask me to say that I liked it. The gilded wood and the crude colors hurt my eyes, and the music was fearful. I couldn't understand a word of the sermon and I didn't know what they were doing at the altar, so I had to pass the time looking at Margarida. If I were a man, I could fall in love with her."

"You went to church?" repeated Antonio, bewildered. Throughout their many talks during the week he had avoided the subject of religion. He had seen that it ruffled her, and he preferred not to discuss it until they knew one another's first principles and prejudices in less weighty matters. But he had not once failed, night or morning, to commend the work of Isabel's conversion to Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, or to pray that he might become the instrument of the Holy Ghost therein.

"Why did you go?" he asked. "To look at Margarida?'

"Most decidedly not," she retorted with spirit. "I didn't know who the pretty girl in the mantilla was till I came home. Fisher only told me this gossip two hours ago."

"Then you went to church to see what it was like?" he persisted, hoping, nevertheless, that there was some better reason.

"I went because I wanted to," she answered. "But come back to the point. Is it true about Margarida?"

He had gradually become aware of a new sympathy between them. All the resentment and distrust faded out of his heart. His gaze sought hers; and not until he could look down into her eyes did he answer:

"It is not true. It never was. It never will be."

The last syllable had hardly sped clear of his lips when the monk was struck dumb by the truth. It flashed from Isabel's radiant eyes like a flaming sword into his heart. A moment later she had turned away her face; but she could not hide the magic roses, the great crimson roses, which sprang to full bloom upon her cheeks. He knew her secret; and she knew that it was known.

To cover her trouble and confusion, she moved to find her little gloves and the embroidered bag. Antonio stooped down before her and was the first to pick them up; but she snatched them almost roughly out of his hand.

"We've stayed too long," she said. "I must go."

In a twinkling she had crossed the stepping-stones and was in full flight for home. No wood-nymph pursued by a god of old ever flew with more gazelle-like grace; and the ravine seemed shorn of nearly all its beauty when the trees hid her from Antonio's eyes.

IV

On Monday morning, although he had business in Navares, Antonio was early at the pool. Throughout a sleepless night his moods had wavered from bitter self-reproach to laborious self-justification. But, amidst all the waverings, one decision stood firm. He must see Isabel at once. He must not run away. He must not tolerate, either on his part or on hers, any spurious delicacy, any eluding of a thorough understanding.

Try as he would Antonio could not wholly close his eyes to the grim humor of the situation. Within the narrow space of three weeks two young and handsome heiresses had thrown themselves at his, a monk of Saint Benedict's, head. But, while this oddity brought a bitter smile to his lips, he was not able to take pleasure or pride in events which were bringing pain and humiliation to others. The feeling uppermost in his heart was one of shame and sorrow for his indiscretion and weakness in meeting Isabel so secretly and so often.

About half-past ten she came, looking pale and rather frail. But she had nerved herself for the ordeal before her, and she was calm and self-controlled.

"I knew you would come," she said quietly. "Yet I feared you wouldn't. Early this morning I nearly sent Jackson down to the farm with a note; but I didn't want people to talk."

"I came nearly an hour ago," the monk replied. His tones were so grave and his manner so solemn that a flush of resentment rose to her cheek.

"Don't make things worse than they are," she cried angrily. "Aren't they difficult enough already? You won't help matters by looking and speaking as if you've come to a funeral."

Antonio could not retort that he was indeed standing by a graveside and that he had come to drop a farewell tear upon their dead happiness. He waited for her next words.

"We're obliged to talk out our talk whether we like it or not," she continued, turning her back upon him and tearing at the fronds of a young mimosa. "I'm not an actress. I can't pretend that I don't know what we both know perfectly well. You can; but I can't. If I left it all to you, I suppose you'd tell me some more about the Emperor Pedro, or about sea-sand grapes. You'd be perfectly polite and, as you imagine, perfectly considerate; and you'd go back to the farm at twelve o'clock."

"I came here," answered Antonio, "expressly to talk and to listen without a moment's false delicacy or a shade of pretense."

"Thank you," she said, with a tinge of irony.

Her slender white fingers were still wantonly busy with the mimosa. The monk racked his wits desperately for an opening sentence. He would have preferred the easier task of facing Senhor Jorge and Donna Perpetua and Sir Percy and Mrs. Baxter and the Visconde de Ponte Quebrada and Queen Victoria's Comptroller and the Fazenda official all combined. Words refused to come. But it fell out that his dumbness was all for the best.

"Listen," said Isabel, without turning around. "You don't expect me to find this interview very delightful, do you? You'll admit that it's easier for me to talk about usurpers and bunches of grapes than about ... than about all this. I'll tell you what I've done. Perhaps I've done wrong, as usual; but I can't help it. I'm going to give you a letter--I mean a paper, a scribble. Some things are so much easier to write than to say. After I've given it to you I'm going away for a walk. I shall come back in half an hour. You may open my little bag. It is in there."

Antonio loosened the cords of the silken pouch with respectful hands. It contained the damascened key of the chapel, a tiny lump of shining felspar picked up from the path, a pair of fine gloves, two or three small coins, and a folded paper. As he drew the paper forth, a snapping of twigs made him look up. Isabel was breaking her way through the trees.

His hand trembled as he unfolded the document. It was a quarto sheet filled from top to bottom with Isabel's fine writing. The monk glanced down the hill to make sure that she had come to no harm; and as soon as he caught sight of her walking quickly along one of the woodland paths, he sat down on a warm boulder and began to read these lines:

_Four years ago you and Mr. Austin Crowberry visited the Earl of Oakland. You dined at Castle Oakland, and stayed all the next day._

_The Countess of Oakland is my aunt. I hardly ever see her, because my father quarreled with the Earl nearly twenty years ago. But the Earl has a niece, Lady Julia Blighe, whom I met in London a few days after you went away. Perhaps you remember her. She is a little over-magnificent, and wears too much jewelry at once; but people go mad over her, and some say she is the most beautiful woman in England._

_You made a most extraordinary impression on Lady Julia. She admitted giving you a flower. I grew tired of hearing about you--nearly bored to death. At first she caused me to picture you as a beautiful Byronic hero, with a Great Grief or a Dark Secret; and I detest all that sort of trash and gush. But one day, while she was chattering, a miracle happened. I can't describe it. Perhaps it was like someone throwing wide a door that had always been shut, or setting free a bird or animal that had always been caged. All in one moment you became the most important fact in the world. Why? How? I don't know. I thought I knew you through and through. Often I could have said to Lady Julia: "No. That's all wrong. You know nothing about him."_

_I can't explain it. I am simply telling you the fact. From that time you haunted me. I became absolutely certain that our lives, some day, would meet; more certain than I am of the sun's existence and the moon's. When Mr. Crowberry told me of the plan for buying this place, and my becoming your neighbor out in these wilds, I ought to have been overwhelmed by the astonishing coincidence; but it seemed as natural and inevitable as the sunrise._

_At the first moment--no, not the first--I mean, the second moment of our meeting at your farm, I was mortified because you tried to look at me before I could look at you. Why did you do it? It was unkind. I had been thinking of you for four years; but you, if you thought of me at all, couldn't have thought of me more than four days. Yet, although you were in such a hurry to beat off my eyes, I saw in an instant that you were exactly as I had imagined you. Oporto and the Douro were not in the least like the engravings they showed me in England: but you were my dream come true. And all the time I sat on your right hand at dinner, I felt as if I had known you for years and years. You are not as clever as I expected; but you are gentle, and I am not one bit afraid of you._

_We nearly quarreled about monks and about the azulejos, did we not? Still, it was only on the surface. You think I make too little of religion; I think you make too much: but we have agreed quite amicably to differ. Deep down in our hearts we are at one._

_Since the day my father went to Lisbon I have been happy, for the first time in my life. You left me to make all the approaches; but I was very, very happy until Fisher mentioned Margarida. Last night I ached and burned with shame, because I had let fall the veil from my heart. But this morning I am glad and thankful._

_You are not like other men. And I think I am not wholly like other women. As soon as you have read this paper we are going to tear it into thousands of pieces. So I will be bold. Mine is not the only secret that is out. I know you love me, my friend, my only friend in the world._

Antonio paused in his reading. For a moment he felt an immense relief at learning that he was not to blame. But he reminded himself that his blamelessness did not help Isabel one whit. Here was a mystical passion, an inscrutable supernatural love. No one could explain its beginning, no one could foretell its end. Only by a great effort did he resume the reading of the paper. It continued:

_So much for the past. Now for the present and the future. What are we to do? Don't be hurt, dearest friend, if I write bluntly about practical matters._

_There is a difference in our stations. I suspect that your blood is really nobler than mine and that your escutcheon is less tarnished; but, from the point of view of my friends, this will be a misalliance. Don't be angry. I mention it only to bid you disregard it. I have pondered it well and it weighs less than a sparrow's feather. I am nothing to the people in England; and they shall be nothing to me. Tell me, though; was it this that held you back from wooing me? I believe it was; and that is why the advances came from my side. But, after this, remember! You must court me, woo me. If I command it, you must crick your neck for me, as if I were a Senhorita._

_And now about my father. You may fear that it will be a blow to him. Certainly it will amaze him and disconcert him. But if you were not in the case, my friend, I should have to amaze him and disconcert him some other way. So long as I and Mrs. Baxter and Jackson are with him, he doesn't realise the flight of time. He thinks of me as a little girl, and of himself as a man of forty who must needs be up and doing. He has fought his hard fight and he deserves his rest. More. He needs it. The Navares doctor says he will go out like a candle in a gale if he does not surrender. Whatever you may think, I love my father; and, even for your sake, I would not leave his side if it were not wholly for his good. God knows I am honest in this and in every word I have written._ ISABEL.

Mechanically refolding the sheet, Antonio rose to his feet and drew a deep breath. In a few minutes Isabel would return. She would steal as shyly as a young deer through the branches. She would expect him to spring towards her, to clasp her in his arms, to murmur proud words of possession, to lavish in her ears his long-hoarded treasure of love-words, to press kisses on her hands, her cheeks, her eyes, her hair. Like a terrifying tocsin her words clanged in his brain: "My friend, my only friend in the world, you love me!"

He turned his gaze towards the Atlantic. But the day was growing sultry. Thunder was in the air and mists hid the great waters. He dared not look into the woods lest he should espy the slender figure tripping towards him. And somehow he could not lift up his eyes and his heart to heaven. In this cruel issue his inborn instincts of a courtly gentleman wore down his acquired habits of piety, until it savored of a coarseness or of a lapse from honor to breathe a word of this rare ladye's secret, even into the pitiful ears of God's saints and angels. Thus earth and sea and sky alike failed him. He closed his eyes.

Suddenly a rosy light and a delicious perfumed warmth seemed to suffuse his body and soul. Of course. His way was plain. God had frozen his cry for help upon his lips because it was no longer God's will that he should mortify his manhood in dogged fidelity to obsolete vows. He had vowed his vows in the belief that the Order would continue, and that he would live and die in its midst, upheld by its hourly discipline and devotion. He had not left the Order: the Order had left him. For seven years he had labored to restore it, and he had failed. He was free.

Free. Free to be as other men, free to hail the most wonderful and beautiful of maidens, free to exult over her, free to receive her marvelous love and to give it back a thousand-fold. He opened his eyes, and involuntarily held out his arms.

With bent head Isabel was picking her way up the slope. Her exquisite hands held her pretty dress of sprigged muslin clear of the thorny undergrowth. Sunbeams played with her golden ringlets. Antonio watched her with a sense of intoxication. This lovely girl was his, body and spirit, all his.

She drew nearer until he could see the blue of her large eyes, the peach-bloom of her soft cheeks. Then, with the suddenness of an earthquake, the greatest miracle of his life befell.

Hundreds of times in the past, especially at seasons of abounding faith and high ecstasy, he had prayed that the Blessed Virgin would fly to his relief if ever he should weaken in this most perilous of his vows. "Pray for me, O Mother of mothers, O Virgin of virgins!" he had cried again and again. "Pray for me whenever I cannot, or will not, pray for myself." And, as Isabel parted the branches behind the mimosa, those hundreds of old prayers were answered. Celestial fire and supernal power filled his whole being so suddenly and mightily that he was conscious of a physical pang, of a roaring in his ears like rushing winds and resounding waters, of a great brightness before his eyes.

He stepped forward and held back the last bough.

V

The heat of conflict and the flush of victory had wrought so great a change in Antonio's expression that Isabel started when they came face to face. But she interpreted his transfiguration as an ecstasy of love and joy; and her blue eyes suddenly shone with a radiance as wonderful as his own.

Before her proud and happy gaze Antonio's cheeks grew pale. It was as if a pet lamb were looking up to him for a caress, when all the time he was gripping a butcher's knife behind his back. It was as if some smiling friend were holding out to him an exquisite vase full of lilies and roses which he must straightway dash into pieces. Isabel seemed so frail, so soft, so white, so trustful, so lamb-like; and her love was surely the most fragrant and beautiful thing in all the world.

"You are coy," she said laughing gaily. "And you have turned as pale as a swooning heroine in an English novel. I suppose you're going to say, 'Give me time: this is so sudden!'"

Although Antonio remained silent, no doubt of his love crossed her mind. Had she not read love in his eyes, time after time? She took it for granted that he was merely tongue-tied because of the strangeness of the situation.

"You have read it?" she asked, drawing the folded paper from his unresisting hand. "Every word?"

He bowed assent. For a minute or two her slender fingers busied themselves tearing the document first into ribbons, then into small squares, and finally into tiny shreds. After she had mixed the shreds well together she ran to the lower end of the pool and threw them, one small handful at a time, into the swirling rapids.

"You are tired," said Antonio when she returned. "The day is sultry. Later on there will be thunder. You have walked a long way. You must sit down."

Isabel seated herself on the flat boulder. But although there was room at her side the monk remained standing. She pouted unconsciously and darted two furtive glances at his eyes. The first glance was only a glance of slight disappointment and of shy reproof; but the second was a glance of sudden anguish and sickening fear. The silence lengthened until she could bear it no longer.

"Speak to me!" she commanded indignantly. "Why do you stand there saying nothing? I suppose you despise me?"

"Isabel," he said, calling her by her name for the first time, "you know I don't despise you."

He spoke her name in a voice so strangely sweet that her ears tingled and her heart leaped. And when his brown velvet eyes looked into hers with sorrowful tenderness all her pride broke down.

"Then why are you so cruel?" she cried. "Why do you make it so hard for me? Haven't I humiliated myself enough? You are cruel. Why do you not tell me that you love me?"

The supernal grace and might which had miraculously fulfilled Antonio's body and soul enabled him to triumph over temptation; but they did not deliver him from anguish. The sword which was about to rend the heart of Isabel scorched him as it circled downward for its dreadful work. Her coming ordeal was already his; and he stood in the midst of it as in a burning fiery furnace.

Isabel sprang up and faced him. Their eyes were less than a yard apart. Antonio's continued silence was sufficient answer; but she fought fiercely against the truth. Clasping her white hands desperately against her breast, she challenged him in short, panting sentences.

"This is horrible, too horrible," she began, "I tell you it is too horrible. You can't, you daren't look me in the eyes and say you don't love me!" And when he still delayed to speak she raised her voice and commanded sharply: "Answer!"

He looked her in the eyes with immeasurable sadness, and answered:

"I do not love you in the way you mean."

"The way I mean? What is the way I mean? Either you love me or you don't. There are no two ways in love." She spoke hotly and with scorn.

"In the paper you've just torn up," he replied, "you called me your dearest friend in the world. In that sense, I love you. In all the world, you are my dearest friend."

"And no more? Not an atom more?"

He hesitated.

"Come," she said bitterly. "You are trying me too far. If this is some subtlety, some finesse, let us save it until another day. For the last time, I ask you: Can you stand up here in the sight of the God you believe in, and say that I am no more to you than your dearest friend?"

It came home to Antonio that he could not, with perfect truthfulness, say that she was his friend and no more. Yet how was he to evade her question? Plainly the cruel, hateful moment had come for striking the fair vase to pieces, for driving the butcher's knife into the white lamb's heart. He raised his head and resumed the mastery over her by a single movement of his inextinguishable will.

"My dearest friend in the world," he said gently. "If I am to blame for the smallest fraction of this wonderful and terrible thing which has come to pass, I crave your pardon here and now with all my heart, and I will ask God's pardon every day until I die. But ... for God's sake, let us forget. Let yesterday and to-day be as if they had never been. How a woman like you could ever waste one thought of love on a man like me neither of us can explain."

She heard him with wildly staring eyes.

"You offer me," he concluded, "a gift beyond all price. But I must turn my back, I must close my eyes, I must stop my ears. I am pledged to another Bride."

They were the words he had used to Senhor Jorge. But, this time, he uttered them proudly; for he had meditated upon them often since the serão. He knew that they were not a mean verbal quibble, and that they enshrined the foremost fact of his life. As they left his lips the spiritual world was as real and near as the cascade, as real and near as the mossy boulder, as real and near as Isabel.

His delicacy moved the monk to turn away without even the briefest glance at the effect of his declaration upon Isabel. But she did not desire his consideration. Something magnetic in her anger compelled him to raise his eyes. He saw that she too had moved away.

"Another Bride?" she repeated slowly, barbing every syllable with scorn. "Another Bride? Indeed. What an entirely enviable young woman!"

For a few moments her sarcasm sustained her. With her hands hanging easily at her side she stood haughtily erect, smiling a scornful smile. But it did not last. Without warning she ran towards him and cried, with a break in her voice:

"It isn't true!"

"It is true," said the monk, very gently.

"It is not true!" she went on, stamping her foot. "It isn't. It can't be. If it were true you would have told me before. You'd have dropped a hint, you'd have talked about her. I tell you it isn't true. If it were true you'd have told me when you denied the talk about Margarida. You are a man. You are not a cur and a brute."

"This is unjust," cried Antonio. "How could I tell you yesterday, after Margarida? You ran away home like the wind. And why should I drop hints? Surely they would have been a great impertinence. How should I dream that you, an English lady, with a proud old name, would ever think so of me, a wine-merchant's clerk?"

"Then why did you make love to me fifty times?" she retorted.

"Fifty times? Made love? This is madness. On my honor and conscience I have not breathed a word of love to you even once."

"Who said you'd breathed words? I didn't. But you've made love with your eyes. Over and over and over again you have looked at me as if I was as much to you as you were to me, and as if you and I were the only beings in the world."

"I swear you are mistaken, utterly mistaken," cried Antonio.

Isabel had ceased to listen. She clenched her hands together once more against her breast and stood gazing towards the mists which hid the Atlantic. When she spoke again it was not to Antonio. She seemed rather to be thinking aloud, with quick impassioned utterance.

"So this is the end," she began. "Yet how long it has been in coming! I have been happy for ten days--ten whole days. When was I ever happy for three days and nights before? But it's over now. What a memory to carry to my grave--the memory of this end! I've made a fool of myself. I've made myself cheaper than dirt. I've pressed myself on a man who won't have me."

Antonio took a step forward; but, without paying him the smallest attention, she continued:

"It's happened to other women, no doubt. But the other women weren't so hungry and thirsty for a little happiness as I was. They didn't have mothers who died the day they were born. They didn't have fathers who forget their very existence for months and months at a time. They've had homes, they've had friends, they've had all the lesser love. But I ... I have had nothing, from anybody, anywhere, ever."

She laughed a laugh like iron against iron. The monk could endure it no longer. He sprang to her side. For the first time, he touched her hand. She snatched it free as if he had burnt it, and looked at him fiercely.

"Go away," she cried, "I hate you!"

"No," he said. "I won't go away till you are less unhappy, and till you forgive me."

His gentle compulsion mastered her. She allowed him to lead her back to the boulder. This time he sat down at her side. As he did so she bent her head. Tears came into her eyes. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands and wept without restraint.

Antonio, sitting so near to her that he could have encircled her with his arm, suffered as bitterly as Isabel. The momentary temptation to trample on his vow no longer had the slightest power over him; but his whole heart yearned to end her grief, or, at the least, to comfort her. She was so like a sobbing, heartbroken child that it seemed inhuman to sit beside her without drawing her head to his shoulder or even stroking her hands. Yet he knew that it would be more inhuman still to rise up and move away.

She overcame her sobs at last; and, turning upon him eyes like April skies, she demanded abruptly:

"This Bride? What is she like?"

"Let us not talk of her now," said Antonio, as soon as he could command his words. "Surely it is better not."

"Is she like Margarida?"

"No."

"Prettier?"

"For Heaven's sake," he pleaded, "do not ask these questions?"

"Answer me at once. Is she prettier than I am? In England they call me pretty. I suppose I'm ugly to a Portuguese. I suppose she's a hundred times more beautiful than I am."

"There are different kinds of beauty," said Antonio.

"Is she clever?"

Antonio considered well. Then he replied:

"In Her case I should not use the word 'clever.' But, I entreat you, ask me no more."

He rose to his feet with a look which silenced her. A moment afterwards she too sprang up. Stepping quickly to the pool, she dipped her little handkerchief in the laughing water and tried to bathe away the traces of her tears. When she sailed back towards him she came proudly.

"This ought to be the end," she said. "I ought not to see you alone again. But I don't forbid you to come just once more. Perhaps I shall be here to-morrow morning. I don't say I shall, and I don't say I shan't."

Her steady gaze commanded an answer: but it was only by a huge effort that Antonio succeeded in replying:

"You have spoken truly. We ought not to meet alone again."

"No, we ought not. Most decidedly we ought not," she flashed back scornfully. "But we will!"

And without another word or glance she hastened away.

VI

Isabel could not sleep. In order to postpone the hour of solitude she had sat up late talking to Fisher, practising Portuguese with Joanninha, and writing letters to her few friends in England. Finally she had astounded Mrs. Baxter by asking to be told all about the early life of the callous young Viscountess Datton and by listening without a murmur to the details which the Excellent Creature multitudinously invented. But the moment came when Mrs. Baxter's love of bed overbore her love of hearing herself talk. She rang the bell and Jackson came in, yawning, with the candles.

When Isabel lay down she set the whole power of her will to the barricading of her mind against the day's cruel memories. But it was all in vain. Every word she had spoken to Antonio, every syllable of his replies, vibrated afresh in her ears, scorching them with shame. Twice or thrice she clenched her fist as if she would strike some invisible enemy or revenge herself on the author of her loss and humiliation. Sometimes her cheeks burned crimson: sometimes she felt all the blood ebb from them. Her spiritual anguish brought in its wake a physical pain, sickening and hardly bearable, like the pains after the first shock of a dizzy fall or a brutal blow. She seemed to be aching all over; and more than once she moaned aloud.

Even without her shame and grief Isabel could hardly have slept. All through the afternoon and evening the air had been growing sultrier and sultrier. Not once in England, not even during brazen August, had she known such a stifling heat. Both her windows stood wide open; but they seemed to be admitting fiery vapors rather than life-giving airs. Even the fine linen sheet was too hot and heavy to be endured. She flung it aside and lay with nothing to cover her save a plain night-robe of the thinnest Indian silk. At first she tossed from side to side; but so much exertion soon exhausted her, and she lay still, gasping for breath.

At length the heat became unendurable. She rose and went to the window. Two or three miles away, over the woods, over the abbey, beyond Antonio's farm, the surly Atlantic was growling his muffled growl through the sultry air. Quite near at hand the shrunken torrent was rumbling down through the underwoods. Isabel listened. The airy ocean and the seaward-hurrying brook seemed to invite her, and to be beckoning her with cool hands. She leaned out, fain to be a little nearer.

There was no moon, and the stars could not pierce the stagnant clouds. Yet the night was not solidly dark. The outlines of the taller trees could be traced against the sky, and the pavement which surrounded the guest-house glimmered like white limestone.

Isabel was suddenly filled with an overmastering desire to break her prison walls and to walk free under the open sky. Apart from its bitter associations she would have lacked courage to visit the pool and the cascade in the dead of night; for the narrow path thither wound in and out of somber thickets. But the broad way, broad enough for a carriage, which ran down from the guest-house to the abbey, and thence, through the avenue of camellias, to the principal gate had no terrors for a soul almost untroubled by superstitious fears. It seemed to the half-stifled, heart-sick Isabel that if she could escape from the house unheard by Jackson and Mrs. Baxter she might find life and healing in those ampler spaces. She did not admit to herself that the broad path and, especially, the paved space in front of the abbey attracted her because they were rich in unembittered memories of hours with Antonio. Room, more room; air, more air: she thought she wanted nothing besides.

Having dressed herself swiftly in her lightest garments she threw over her hair a black lace mantilla which she had bought in Oporto, thrust her shoes and stockings into her little bag and crept barefoot to the door. It creaked a little when she closed it behind her; but the steady sequence of sounds which continued to come from the bedroom of Mrs. Baxter proved that the Excellent Creature had heard nothing. Isabel turned away with a shrug of distaste, and descended the stairs. There was no need to listen for the snoring of Jackson, who could have gone on sleeping restfully if she had clattered about the corridor in clogs.

The two bolts of the front door were not very hard to draw back, and the latch was easily lifted. On the top step, where she had talked thrice with Antonio, Isabel drew on her stockings and shoes. Then she closed the door behind her, latched it softly, and stole on tiptoe out of earshot down the path.

It was not much cooler in the open than in her chamber. Still, she was glad that she had exchanged her narrow cell for freedom. Besides, the far-stretching woods and the vast heavens were more in scale with her immeasurable sorrow. She walked on quickly, eager to hasten away from her hateful prison. The path was cheerful because it led down to the open lowlands and the refreshing sea.

Midnight, to Isabel's mind, usually held no more terrors than noonday. But when a vague shape confronted her under a tree she started violently. Some gossip of Joanninha's awoke in her memory--some ridiculous village story about a ghostly monk who haunted the domain on dark nights. Advancing boldly upon it she found that the vague shape was only a dead trunk clothed in creepers. She tried to laugh; but the laugh would not come, and suddenly she knew what was meant by fear.

Her instinct was to turn and run home. But the path behind her, backed by the enormous mass of the mountain, looked like a tunnel bored through coal, while the path ahead of her led towards Antonio and José, towards the soft lights and faint voices of the sea. Daring neither to go back nor to stand still, she hurried on until her foot struck a slab of stone.

She had reached the paved space in front of the abbey. The western gable of the chapel hulked up high into the gloom, like the poop of a man-o'-war aground. Upon the warm stone steps, with her back to the door, she sat down until she had regained all her breath and lost nearly all her fears. Isabel saw no reason why she should not sit there until dawn. She hid her face in her hands, and tried to sleep.

A growling in the east aroused her. It was no louder than the Atlantic's growling in the west. Isabel knew that it was thunder; but it seemed to be so far away that she was not alarmed. What surprised her was its long protraction. Unlike the intermittent din of an English thunderstorm it rumbled on unceasingly, until Isabel could almost have believed that she was listening to the echoes of an Armageddon raging among the burnt, far-off hills of Spain. Suddenly, however, a blaze of lightning showed her the terrified Atlantic's ashen face. She had never dreamed of such lightning before. Flash trod upon flash so eagerly that there was a continuous dance of light. The half-seconds of dimness between seemed more positive than the lightning. They were like the convulsive twitchings of a great eyelid over a terrible eye; and Isabel thought she saw flashes of darkness rather than flashes of light.

From the neighborhood of the stepping-stones came a shattering noise, as sharp as a pistol-shot and as loud as an exploding magazine. Immediately, afterwards, as if obeying a preconcerted signal, a fearful cannonading and fusillading began to rage on every hand. Armageddon had swept westward.

Isabel sprang up and huddled back into the scanty shelter of the shallow doorway. So long as there was no rain she welcomed the gigantic grandeur of the thunder, and the cold, pitiless beauty of the lightning. But the rain's herald did not delay to blow his blast. Isabel could not see them; but she felt a swirl of dust and dead leaves rush past her in obedience to his command. Gritty atoms clung to her lips. At the same moment ten thousand trees began to rock and moan in pain; and a warm drop fell upon Isabel's hand.

Down rushed the rain. At first it struck straight down from heaven, but, after a few seconds, it smote the wood slantwise, like millions of thin javelins hurled from a height. The thunder never ceased crackling, banging, booming; and the lightnings were so bright that the tree-trunks stood like smoke-blackened men wielding brilliant scimitars amidst the flying javelins.

Isabel was greedily watching the strife when the wind veered, and a battery of rain discharged its whole broadside full at her face. The gust lasted only a moment; but, when it had passed, her thin dinner-dress was wet all over. She knew that there would be fifty gusts all as bad as the first or worse, and that she must either enter the chapel or be drenched to the skin.

She drew the key from her bag. The lightnings served her for a lantern as she drove the steel into the keyhole; but before she could turn it in the lock another burst of cold rain smacked rudely at her bare shoulders. At length she pushed back the door. The lightnings seemed to leap into the chapel the moment she opened it, like a pack of eager dogs rushing in before their master. Swifter than greyhounds the cold white-and-blue radiance flashed over the cold white-and-blue of the azulejos, and then licked back into the dark.

In her retreat from the rain Isabel had forgotten supernatural terrors. But as soon as she was fairly over the threshold Joanninha's ghost-story rushed anew into her mind, and she was thankful for the lightnings which had shown her that the place was empty. Yet she dared not shut herself up in the chapel; so she resolved to stand just inside.

Without any warning a third gust sucked the great door out of her weak hand. The oak fell to, with a bang, which was nearly drowned in a sharp clap of thunder. Isabel leaped back to reopen it, and tugged at the handle with all her might. But the bolts and springs of the lock had done their work. And the key was outside.

Isabel did not lose her head. As soon as she had recovered from the first shock, the good blood of her old English stock thrilled in her veins. Here was an adventure. Antonio instantly flew into her thoughts, as usual. To-morrow she would meet Antonio. To-morrow she would tell him, this contemptuous Antonio, how she had passed a night of thunder and lightning in a haunted chapel. To-morrow Antonio should be made to realize what sort of a woman he was flouting. To-morrow Antonio would hang his head at the thought of his dull, superstitious, spiritless Portuguese bride.

Propping herself against the wall she took stock of the situation. The chapel was dry; and although her dress was wet it was not wet enough to give her a cold. In four or five hours it would be daylight, and she would have courage to find the spiral staircase. Once on the flat roof of the cloister she would be able to see Jackson and the other servants searching for her. Jackson and the servants and Antonio. They would be sure to send first thing for Antonio.

The warmth with which she pictured Antonio's arrival ebbed away when she suddenly remembered that she was leaning against the blue-and-white tile-painting of the Saint's death at Tyburn. With a little shiver she crossed over to the azulejos representing the Saint's birth. Meanwhile, the rain was still lashing the glass, and the thunder was making a din like the toppling of crags into cañons. What troubled her most was the jeweled crown on the head of the image above the altar. The bluish-white lightning seemed to have an affinity for the bluish-white stones, and several times Isabel felt sure that the brilliance lingered among the points of the diadem after it had fled from the rest of the chapel.

Once she could have sworn that some one entered through the cloister doorway, and that footsteps sounded upon the pavement; but the thunder was loud at the time, and she decided that she had only heard its reverberations. None the less, the fright weakened her nerve. All in a moment she felt weary, chilly, hungry, and so utterly miserable that she nearly cried. She pulled herself up in time and tried to brace up her nerves by chewing the bitter bark of irony. "This is one of my lucky days," she said to herself. "From this morning onward it has been wholly delightful. What a good grateful girl I ought to be!"

An ear-splitting clap of thunder put an end to her soliloquy. So awful was the crash that Isabel listened shuddering for the noise of falling walls and roofs. Not one stone or slate gave way; but she heard a sound a thousand times more fearful. It was a voice, a mumbling voice which seemed to prolong the worn-out rumblings of the thunder; a voice deep and rich; the voice of a man; a voice somewhere in the chapel.

Her heart nearly stopped beating. She strained terrified eyes into the furthest darkness. And she did not strain them in vain. In close succession four or five white beams of lightning lit up the choir.

A monk, in black, was kneeling before the altar.

Isabel's piercing scream was louder than the thunder and the rain. She collapsed in a heap on the pavement. But she did not swoon. Struggling to her feet she dashed herself desperately against the massive door. It stood like a rock. Moaning wildly, she dragged at the lock with both hands. It did not yield a hair's-breadth. A moment later she heard footsteps; and turning round she had one lightning vision of the black monk hurrying towards her. She shrieked again and made a dash in the direction of the cloister doorway. Before she could reach it another white flash showed her the black monk only an arm's length away. As the flash passed she struck a mad blow into the darkness and, hitting nothing, she stumbled and fell forward. But two strong, unghostly arms caught her just in time; and instead of striking the cold stones she found herself upheld by something soft and warm.

Without waiting for the lightning to reveal his face, Isabel knew that she was in the arms of Antonio. Never in her life before had she yielded to any man's caress, save the rare and shamefaced kisses of her father. Yet Antonio's arms seemed to be her natural place, like its nest to a bird. For a few seconds she did not think of identifying the black monk. She believed that the black monk had been on the point of striking her dead, and that some grand magic of love had conjured up Antonio to stand between them in the nick of time. Trembling like a leaf and panting like a runner after a race, she pressed and clung to him, as a terrified child clings to its mother in the dark.

"You are Isabel?" said Antonio. He had known from her first scream that it was she; but he thought it might comfort her to hear his voice speaking her name.

"Yes. I am Isabel," she murmured. And although a sharp memory of the plighted Bride bade her banish herself at once from his clasp she abandoned herself more than before to the warmth and softness of his gentle strength.

"You are safe, quite safe," he said; for she was still trembling all over. "There is no ghost. It was only I."

No ghost? Only he? What did it mean? Isabel roused her deliciously drowsing wits. No ghost. Only he. She opened her eyes. But the chapel was filled full with darkness, and she could not see his face.

A moment afterwards a prolonged blazing of huge lightnings made the place brighter than day. The azulejos, the high windows, and the gilded carvings shone out like blue and white and yellow fires. Isabel could see Antonio's anxious eyes gazing down into her own. And she had time to see much more. She saw his Benedictine habit; she saw that he and the black monk were one and the same man.

She leaped away from him in terror. But terror did not endure. At the touch of his reassuring hand seeking her arm in the gloom, a light as bright as the lightning's blazed within her and a thunderbolt of overwhelming joy swept her off her feet. With a great cry of gladness she flung herself once more against his breast.

"It's true, it's really true?" she clamored. "Speak. Answer me at once. You're not deceiving me? Your Bride is not a real woman after all?"

"You have surprised my secret, and I trust you to keep it," he answered. "When the monks were here they knew me as Father Antonio."

"Antonio, Antonio, Antonio--what a beautiful name!" she cried. "Come, Father Antonio, tell me. Your Bride is only Religion, or the Church, or the Virgin, or something like that?"

Her tone dismayed the monk even more than her words shocked him; and he remained silent.

"You cannot deny it," she exulted. Another flash of lightning silenced her; but the radiant eyes and glowing cheeks on which it shone were more eloquent than her words. And as soon as the swift darkness closed over them her words rang in it like New Year's bells at midnight. "You don't deny it, you can't, you daren't," she sang. "Your Bride is all a mere sentiment, like the azulejos; a romance; an ideal."

"First of all," demanded Antonio, "how did you come here to-night?"

"God sent me. I believe there's a God, at last."

He moved a little, so as to loosen her clasp. But, in her almost hysterical rapture, she did not perceive the movement.

"You are wet through," he said. But she only answered:

"What does it matter?"

"Quick!" he commanded. "There is a lull in the rain. You must go home this moment."

"I won't," said she. "We will stay here."

"Isabel," he retorted sternly, "we will not stay here. You are mad. The storm has driven you out of your senses. Or perhaps it was the ghost you thought you saw. You must go home this instant. What if you have been missed? What if your servants should find us here? What will Mrs. Baxter say? And what shall I say to your father?"

Until he spoke his last sentence Isabel heard him unmoved; but at the thought of her father the arms which held Antonio weakened. Very slowly she let him go. None the less, she sought to argue. The monk, however, enforced his will. Gripping her arm he marched her almost roughly to the west door, and fumbled for the lock.

"It's no use," she said. "The key is outside. We must stay here."

His only answer was to take her arm again and to lead her through the smaller doorway into the cloister. At the moment of their emerging from the chapel a shaft of lightning lit up a bubbling lake of muddy water, under which lay drowned the cloister garden. Two sides of the cloister itself were also under water.

"I am frightened," she said, with genuine fear, as Antonio drew her into a gloomy corridor. He could feel her shrinking back and trembling; so he threw his arm around her waist and hurried her on. As they passed through the kitchen the uproar of the torrent reminded Antonio of the night of his fight with José. But he did not pause. He threaded passage after passage, room after room, until he had worked round to the little door with the Reading monk's secret lock. His fingers searched among the hidden levers, and at last the door stood open.

Frequent lightning still swept sea and land; but the thunder had dragged its great guns northward and was pounding over Navares. The rain had ceased. The monk, however, did not hurry Isabel over the threshold; for the overarching trees were pouring down water like an aqueduct cracked by an earthquake. He considered earnestly.

"Come," he said, with an abruptness which startled her. "I must wrap you in this cloak."

With much tucking and folding he contrived to wrap his habit about her slender body and to adjust the mantilla over her fragrant hair.

"Now, I suppose, I'm a nun," she laughed.

The speech would have stung him had he not remembered her behavior in his cell, twelve days before, and her evident persuasion that monks and nuns were only picturesque archaisms, with no serious existence outside the pages of novelists and the dreams of pious sentimentalists. But he did not give her time to expand her flippancy.

"Let us go," he said.

They went. For about twenty paces the paved causeway which led to the little door gave them dry foothold. Thenceforward, however, the paths to the guest-house had become rushing streams. Even without the aid of the lightning one could see gleaming water everywhere. Isabel glanced down dolefully at her feet.

"We can't," she said.

"We must," he insisted.

"Look at my shoes," she moaned.

Antonio considered again. Then he asked:

"You will let me carry you?"

"If we can't wait," she answered, after a long pause, "and if you're sure there's no other way ... you may carry me."

He stepped down from the causeway and bent his back so that she could seat herself upon his shoulder.

"You must hold fast," he said.

Very shyly she slipped round his neck a soft arm which trembled. Antonio straightened himself up and plashed forward. Once or twice he came to dips in the path where the water was higher than his knees, but the young giant stamped through the whirlpools like another Saint Christopher. On they went, guided by the flickering lightning. At length they reached the main path. It was hardly ankle deep in water. He quickened his pace, until the guest-house loomed in sight. Then he gently set Isabel down on a boulder away from the drip of the trees and released her from the clumsy habit, which he folded up and laid on another great stone.

"You left the door unlocked?" he whispered.

"Yes."

"For Heaven's sake don't speak so loud. Better still, don't speak at all. I'm going to carry you as softly as I can to the steps. Don't breathe a word on the way. And don't open the door until I am back under the trees. I shall wait to see that you are safe. Now!"

"No, no, not yet," she whispered.

"Yes. Now. This moment. You are mad."

"I know. But, Antonio, promise. To-morrow morning. At the cascade."

"I promise," he said.

Once more he lifted her up: but this time, as the distance was so short, he carried her in his arms like a child. He did not look at her; but he knew that she was strangely light with a fairy lightness, that her shoulders were snow and her hair pure gold, and that she was as fine and delicate as a lily. Before he took his first stride towards the guest-house he paused, straining his ears for any sound within. Around him, in the woods, a hundred little streams went bubbling and tinkling. Here and there thankful birds were piping their peace-pipes after the din of the battle. The chant of the Atlantic, freshened by the breeze, was loud and glad.

"Listen, Antonio," she murmured. "All the world is singing."

Gripping her as if he would choke her next words before she could speak them, the monk crossed the path. Twelve strides sufficed him for their journey. At the foot of the steps he put her down; and, before she could whisper Good-night, he was speeding noiselessly back to the great stone.

As soon as she had entered the guest-house and closed the door he made haste to put on his habit; for the air had grown cold. Then he shrank into the dripping trees and waited. By this time the clouds were gone and the stars were shining.

Isabel appeared at the window and beckoned imperiously. He stole softly forward and saw her hand moving like a white butterfly among the creepers clustering round the casement. She broke off a half-blown rose which had not been shattered by the storm and threw it to Antonio. He caught it deftly; but his fingers closed too tightly on its thorns, and when he re-entered the abbey to exchange his habit for his old cloak he saw that the white flower was flecked and veined with blood.

VII

It was Isabel who arrived first at the pool. She found the stepping-stones impassable. A cypress had been struck by lightning, and the wind and rain had torn millions of autumn leaves from the other trees. But the storm was over, the mists and stifling heats were gone, and the clear sunshine was tempered by a pleasant breeze.

When Antonio joined her the roar of the swollen cataract was so enormous that he had almost to shout in her ear.

"We must go somewhere else," he said. "Here we can't hear ourselves speak. And the ground is too wet. Come."

She followed as he led the way up the mountain. Reaching a point where the torrent was pent within a resounding gorge they leaped easily to the other side. Then they descended, slanting away from the water, until they came to a stone platform which supported a small ruinous chapel. It was one of the oldest shrines in the domain; but Antonio could not remember the time when it had contained an image or an altar.

"You have hurt your hand," she said. "What has cut it?"

"The thorns of a rose," he answered quietly.

His curtness disappointed Isabel. After her painful experience of his perverse obstinacy the morning before, she could not expect him to be converted from his folly or cured of his religious mania all in a moment, and she had come prepared for vigorous debate. But his cold self-possession and, above all, his avoidance of her eyes, dismayed her.

"Of course, you've thrown the rose away?" she asked.

"No, I have not thrown it away."

"Why?"

He spread his cloak on a carved stone bench for her to sit on, and did not answer.

"Why?" she repeated. "I want Father Antonio to explain. Are monks allowed to treasure up dead flowers? You'll be asking next for a tress of my hair."

He maintained his grim silence. Embarrassment and injured pride colored her cheeks a warm red; but she was determined to make him speak.

"I mean," she added, "that you won't ask for a lock of my hair at all. You'll expect me to go down in the dust and offer it you on my knees, and to coax you and implore you for days and days until you condescend to accept it. Your Majesty is a true Lord of Creation. He leaves me to do all the wooing."

This time Antonio looked at her fairly and squarely. She sat down and faced him with a pout on her lips and a toss of the head. In her heart she felt sure of victory; and she yearned to get over the preliminary skirmishes as soon as possible.

"Begin, your Reverence," she said. "Preach at me. Excommunicate me. Do your worst. I am ready."

"Ought I to begin," he asked, "by craving pardon for trespassing last night in the chapel?"

"No, you ought not. It wouldn't be sincere; because you believe the chapel is more yours than mine. And, most decidedly, you oughtn't to begin as if we are mortal enemies. Why are your tones as sharp and cold as icicles? And why do you glare at me as if you hate me?"

"I hate nobody," he replied. "But I hate this talk which we are compelled to have."

"Then let us make haste and be done with it. Explain. I want to know why you pretend to be still a monk, when you're really a farmer?"

"I pretend nothing," said Antonio firmly. "You will keep my secret. You will not name it even to your father. Above all, you will hide it from your servants, and from the chief of the Villa Branca Fazenda. I am, and I shall be till I die, a monk of the Order of Saint Benedict."

"Monks have been abolished in Portugal for years and years," she objected.

"You mean that monks have been exiled and monasteries suppressed. Monks cannot be abolished. Men can pull down blinds and put up shutters and sit in darkness; but they cannot abolish the sun."

"Choose some other illustration," she begged. "Surely it is monks who put up shutters and draw down blinds and shut out the light."

She proceeded to rattle off half a dozen well-worn objections to the monastic life. Her words were her own; but underneath their freshness and liveliness Antonio recognized the stock tirade against monks and nuns which he had heard twenty times in England. He listened patiently till she had finished. Then he said:

"We are not thinking of the same thing. Such monks and nuns as you are scorning do not exist. They are figments of your controversialists. They are stuffed figures, set up like skittles to be knocked down again. May I speak quite candidly?"

"Speak quite candidly, or do not speak at all," she answered.

"And personally?"

"The more personally the better."

"Then listen. You remember our first Wednesday--the day you and I and young Crowberry went all through the monastery?"

"You mean the day you brought me the little blue bird with the orange-colored tail?"

"You remember," continued Antonio, "how I showed you a monk's cell. That cell was mine. I lived in it for seven years. You pulled open all the drawers and looked inside the cupboard."

Isabel flushed crimson, and demanded indignantly:

"How did I know it was yours?"

"You didn't know it was mine," he answered gently. "Still, it was certainly somebody's. For a moment, as you peeped and rummaged, I was distressed and disappointed. How could I reconcile it with your delicacy? But I soon found the answer. I understood that you thought of monks as you might think of your British Druids or of the Crusaders or of the Incas of Peru or of the Andalusian Moors--men that have lived and breathed once, men that were picturesque, men that figure well in romances, but, most of all, men that are utterly dead and gone and done with. Perhaps it is natural for you so to think. Your England has been without monks, save in holes and corners, for three hundred years."

She was on the point of asking what all this might be leading to, when he added:

"Again, last night, when I wrapped you in my habit, you laughed and said: 'Now I suppose I am a nun.' You no more intended to make fun of holy things than a bird intends sacrilege when it darts into a church and knocks down candles and vases with its wings. But you said it, all the same."

"I don't deny saying it," she retorted; "I know perfectly well that I am coarse and wicked enough to say anything."

"I am not blaming you, Isabel," he said gently. "You are not coarse and you are not wicked. We are at variance on the greatest of issues; but may God forbid that we should quarrel."

The softness with which he spoke her name disarmed Isabel; and the fountains of lovingkindness which overbrimmed his words quenched the fire of wrath in her breast. To make sure that he was forgiven Antonio gazed at her with eyes so full of the old searching tenderness that a lump rose in her throat, and she looked away.

"No, I am not blaming you, Isabel," he continued. What I mean is this. You find it impossible to take all these things seriously. You think I enjoy dressing up in a monk's cowl and reciting a monk's Latin Office in a monk's stall, pretty much as other men enjoy putting on crowns and ermine and going to masques as princes and kings. You don't see that the mere cowl is very little more than nothing, and that a monk's faith and hope and love are nearly everything. You cried out in the chapel last night: 'So your Bride is only Religion, or only the Church, or only the Virgin.' Yes 'Only.' You said 'only.' And I am not quibbling on a mere word. You meant that a mortal bride--such a bride, for example, as Margarida--would be more real, more important, more entitled to my lifelong loyalty."

He ceased. After pondering a little she raised her eyes and said:

"In the main you are right. I'm afraid my vague notions of monks are not worth the trouble; but you have analyzed them correctly. In England we have some people who want to revive medieval tournaments with mailed men and horses, and lists, and queens of beauty, all complete. To me a modern monastery is practically the same thing, except that it's less interesting and more useless."

"I do not know enough of your mind," he said slowly. "After all, monasticism is not the whole of the Church. The Church is wider and older than her religious orders. Do you object only to monasticism in particular? Or are you equally impatient of the Church in general?"

"By the Church," she answered, "no doubt you mean Roman Catholicism. If so, I'm not a fair judge. I was educated with a bias against it, and I am gradually finding out that I was taught a great deal which was unfair and much that was untrue. But I will answer you as frankly as possible. Don't be hurt. I love the Church as I love a ruin in a landscape; but I should not love her if somebody should accomplish the impossible, and put her in a thorough state of repair."

Springing up she stepped to the tumbledown shrine and laid her hands on the mossy shafts of its ivy-hung portal.

"Be honest," she said. "Is not this little chapel far more beautiful in decay than ever it was when the roof didn't leak and these creepers were not allowed to twine about it? If I could wave a wand and bid every beauty-spot of moss vanish from the walls and make all the stones dead-white and all the angels sharp and true, would you love it as you do now? And it's the same, the very same, with the Church. When she was mistress of Europe, she was gaunt and hard and repellent. But she is marvelously picturesque in her decay. I don't know what our poets and painters and romancers would do without her."

"I still read English papers, and I know what you mean," said Antonio. "There is a fashion growing up among your poets of making free with the holiest things. They affect the reverence and simplicity of medieval believers when, in reality, they are robbing altars and looting sacristies to fill a property-box with theatrical properties. Chalices, censers, copes, chasubles, dalmatics, miters, pyxes; bishops, abbots, nuns, monks, friars, acolytes; crypts, stained glass, pointed arches, carven canopies--I see that all these are no more to them than stage backgrounds, stage puppets, stage dresses, stage tricks."

"It makes the poems and paintings much more gorgeous, anyhow," she interrupted.

"No doubt," said Antonio sternly. "Just as the palaces and harems of the Turks were more gorgeous after they had sacked the Holy Places. Let the Church be persecuted more than ever in your country, and I do not fear for her; but I tremble at the thought of your cleverest men taking her name in vain and praising her with their lips, while they are still obstinate pagans in their hearts and lives. Out of such blasphemy I foresee the birth of monstrous sins."

"Until this morning," retorted Isabel, grievously disappointed in him, "I thought you were no worse than over-pious, and a little over-sentimental about your religious memories. I could never have believed that you would be bigoted and narrow-minded. Your prophecy only makes me shudder. I repeat that the beautiful decay of the Church is bringing more beauty into art; and I believe that more beauty in art will bring more beauty into life. Yet you say it will give birth to monstrous sins."

For a long time Antonio did not reply. When he spoke his tone was so much altered that Isabel thought he accepted his defeat in argument.

"Look at this," he said, pointing to a stone which lay near his foot. It had been a gargoyle on the shrine, but must have fallen to the ground before Antonio was born. Even if the shallow carving had not been almost rubbed away by the hand of time Isabel could hardly have made out its outlines through the silken mosses and tiny ivies which covered it.

"It was part of the shrine once," he said. "I admit it looks more beautiful broken off and lying here in decay. I've never noticed it before. It ought to be in the porch. It isn't heavy. Will you help me to carry it?"

They stooped down together. The unclouded sun had already dried both the gargoyle and its mossage and leafage. Isabel took her fair share of the work, and between them they easily lifted the stone from the ground. But they had not borne it twenty inches towards the shrine before she let go and sprang clear, with a scream. The gargoyle struck upon a knob of rock and smashed into three pieces.

Antonio's glance followed Isabel's. She was gazing with horror at the long black grave from which they had wrenched the stone. It was a nest of centipedes. The creatures writhed this way and that, like the letter S, incalculably multiplied and gone mad. Some of them were bright scarlet, some were sickly yellow. Beyond them, half of a long worm, bald and clammy, lay across the slimy track of some hidden slug. A scurrying ear-wig touched it, and the worm disappeared as if by magic into the earth. Meanwhile two horny beetles were shouldering their way through the stubby grass.

The monk had hardly realized the success of his too vivid allegory when he saw that Isabel had snatched up her skirts and fled. He grabbed his cloak and leaped after her; but although he was almost immediately at her side, she continued her flight without recognizing his existence. After two or three minutes a swollen tributary of the torrent brought her to a halt.

"I am so sorry," he said, very humbly. "I never thought it could be so horrible as that."

"You're sorry too late," she cried. "I know you love me; yet you're always acting as if you despise me. It's your chief delight to humiliate me. Religion ruins you. Till we get to religion your heart is tenderer than a woman's; but, when religion comes in, I believe you'd burn me at the stake and feel proud of it."

Great tears came into her eyes; but before he saw them he had already recognized how thoughtless and unkind he had been in luring her to lift the gargoyle. The sight of the tears completed his repentance.

"With my whole heart I ask pardon," he pleaded, "although what I did was almost unpardonable. I didn't think; but it was selfish and brutal to score a point like that. Isabel, try to forgive me."

Whenever he spoke her name and looked into her eyes she became as clay in his hands. But Antonio did not know it. He took her silence to mean anything but pardon; and therefore his tone was humbler than ever as he added:

"We cannot part like this, Isabel. These rocks are dry and warm to your feet. We shall find no better spot."

He spread his cloak for her once more, and sat down at her side. Two or three minutes passed without a word. Then she said:

"If I am all wrong about monks, I am willing to be put right. What are monks for? Why do they exist?"

Antonio hesitated. There were so many gaps in her knowledge and in her sympathy. How could he explain the topmost flowering of churchly life to one who knew so little of the root and the trunk and the branches? At last he replied:

"You have spoken of painters and writers. Is it not true that both painting and writing have advanced almost entirely through the diligence of professional writers and painters? How soon the amateur slips back without the example of the professional to steady him! In our wars we have always found that a few professional soldiers can stiffen citizen levies who would otherwise run away. Monks, so to speak, are the professional Christians, devoting their lives to piety and the pursuit of perfection. I don't mean that they are professional like your English clergy. Monks are not professional shepherds. I might say that they are professional sheep, a professional flock, exemplifying, as Christians in the world can hardly do, blamelessness, simplicity, and obedience at every moment to their divine Shepherd's voice."

He paused; but Isabel made no comment.

"In comparing monks with professionals," he said uneasily, "I know I am putting it on rather a low level."

"So I thought," she said. And with a leap of his heart, he understood that she was not outside the range of Christian spirituality.

"Then we will put it higher," he continued eagerly. "Grant for a moment that Christianity is true. Grant that the everlasting God, Who carved these hills and poured out yonder Atlantic, once imprisoned Himself in space and time and became a mortal man. Grant that before He died for us, He begged for our lifelong love and trust, and for our daily praise and prayer, and good deeds and obedience and self-denial. Grant that He told us how this present life of ours is only a short road leading into a boundless life to come. For the moment you will grant all this?"

She bowed her head.

"Granting it, what do we find?" he asked. "We find the vast majority of men and women, including those who profess to believe His words, living for themselves instead of for Him. 'Seven times in a day have I sung praises unto Thee,' said the Psalmist, who died so long before our Lord was born; yet millions of Christians do not truly praise God seven times in their lives. They rarely think of Him save in time of trouble or in the hour of death. The monk is a man who throws all his poor weight into the other scale, striving to redress the balance. In union with the one Mediator he prays for those who will not pray. He offers praises in the stead of those who will not praise. The scoffer twits him with his unnatural life; but it is not more unnatural to give God all one's thoughts than it is unnatural to give Him none."

"Not more unnatural, perhaps," objected Isabel, "but it is unnatural enough, all the same."

"It may be so. But the monk is born into an unnatural state of things. If no man gave God too little, perhaps we should have no need of monks to give Him what men call too much. Perhaps so: perhaps not. I don't decide. Some monkish writers have seemed to say that even if all men were saints it would still be good for a few to detach themselves from the whirl of life and to offer God more perfect praises; just as there have been theologians to teach that, even if man had not sinned, God would still have been made Man, so as to perfect our humanity. But let such subtleties pass."

"Whether I agree with it or not, I see what you mean," said Isabel. "But is a monk no more than this?"

"He is much more," replied Antonio, "so much more that if we sat here all day we should hardly understand how much. But I will mention one thing more. Not only do the masses of Christians hold back their love and service from God; they also outrage His goodness and dim His glory every hour of every day."

"But monks can't mend that matter," protested Isabel. "I'm no theologian and I'm a double heretic; but I've always been told that my right can't atone for your wrong. One man can't redeem another."

"No," said Antonio, "but one man's prayers may drive another in penitence to the Redeemer. 'We are members one of another.' You love science. Let me prophesy. Science will teach us some day how subtly mind is intertwined with mind, and how mightily a thought or an aspiration can leap from one soul to another. There is enough of sin and shame in Christendom to make the angels weep; but God alone knows how much more there would be if faithful nuns were not pushing that black bulk back, all night and all day, with white hands of prayer."

Isabel desisted from further debate. But no sooner was the stress of argument eased in her brain than a millstone of fear settled heavily upon her heart. Up to that moment she had felt sure of her power as a living and beautiful woman to triumph over Antonio's shadowy Bride. Although his cool greeting had annoyed her, and although she was still a trifle ruffled by the affair of the gargoyle and the centipedes, she had found zest in his monkish coyness. Like many a huntress before her she had deemed the quarry's elusiveness charming so long as she was confident that in the long run he would be caught. But, all in a single moment, her eyes were opened both to the solemn grandeur of Antonio's religion and to the startling energy of his whole-hearted, whole-minded belief in it. The shadowy Bride suddenly towered like an impassable, immeasurable, resplendent Jungfrau across Isabel's path.

"I see what you mean," she said hastily, trying to push back her crowding fears. "It's interesting, it's wonderful, I suppose it's beautiful in a kind of way; but what has it to do with us? You're not a monk any longer. You can't be. You say it isn't the cowl that makes the monk; and surely, it isn't mere bricks and mortar that make a monastery. The old abbey down there is an empty shell. Your Abbot is dead. Your brethren are dead too, or in perpetual exile. The Order has come to an end. You may play at being a monk; but you are free."

Antonio began to explain the Solemn Vows. But she interrupted him scornfully.

"Circumstances alter cases," she said. "Besides, hadn't you better ask your conscience if you are not really worshiping your vows, worshiping your consistency, instead of worshiping God? God will be poorly worshiped by making yourself miserable--yourself and ... and me."

Her voice so softened on the last two syllables that the monk's lips could not frame an argumentative retort. Yet she must be answered. Although he did not look at her, he could feel that the irons of her ordeal were already glowing too hot for her endurance. Something had to be done. At last he said:

"Without intending it you have told me, a scrap at a time, the story of your life. May I tell you the story of mine?"

Her sorrowful eyes lit up gratefully. "Tell me every word," she said.

In the simplest language he could command, Antonio told her all. He began by stating quite baldly the fact of his noble lineage. Then he described briefly his childhood in Lisbon and at Cintra, and his first sight of an Englishman in the person of a fair-haired young captain who had been wounded at the battle of Bussaco. He told of his 'teens in Madeira, and of the drowning of his parents and sisters on their way thither to join him; of his appointment to a scandalous sinecure in the gift of the Government, and of his retreat from a position which he could do nothing to reform; of his excursion into French scepticism; of his religious vocation and of his struggles against it; and of his life in the monastery up to the day of his ordination to the priesthood.

To the narrating of these events Antonio devoted barely a quarter of an hour. When, however, he began to tell of the monks' expulsion he let himself go; and thenceforward his warmth of tone and liveliness of language made Isabel realize vividly every scene he described. With kindling eyes he told her of the dying Abbot's prophecy; of his halt at the deserted farm on the afternoon of the exodus, and of his resolve to win back the monastery for Saint Benedict's family; of his bitter hour in the granary at Navares; of his tramp northward; of his hard life in Oporto; of his never-to-be-forgotten months in England and France and Spain; of his return to the abbey; of his snub at Villa Branca; of José; of Margarida; and of young Crowberry's mysterious candle in the guest-house window.

"The rest you know," he said.

Throughout his recital he had gazed at the rocks, the sky, the trees, the water; but, as he ended, he glanced nervously at Isabel, hungering for her sympathy yet expecting her scorn. To his amazement she slipped from her place at his side, sank down on her knees beside him, seized both his hands in hers, and said:

"Poor Antonio! You poor Antonio. My poor Antonio!"

Her voice was tenderer than a mother's crooning over a wounded child. Tears were brimming her eyes and flowing down her cheeks as she gazed up into the monk's face. Then her voice broke. She bowed her head abruptly and tried to hide her face in her hands. But she did not let Antonio's hands go; and her tears laved the wounds torn by the thorns of her rose.

Antonio could have endured her contempt; but this outburst of a pitying woman's love, the first he had known for five-and-twenty years, almost broke his heart. Thrice he devised words of consolation; thrice they were stifled in his throat. He could only sit and watch the conclusive rise and fall of her shoulders as the sobbing shook her frame. Once she controlled herself enough to look up and moan:

"Why, oh why, must we be so unhappy?"

The monk knew that an answer was not expected; so he sat silent. But later on, when some calmness had returned to her, she put the question again.

"Why must we be so unhappy? If God can do everything, why has he made a world that goes so badly? Why has he made the easy things sins and only the hard things virtues? Why has he made his creatures so inclined to anger him or forget him? It seems mad. It seems almost diabolical. I've never met a wicked man or a foolish woman who could be foolish enough or wicked enough to make a world like this if they had the power. Why is God worse than we are?"

"You do not mean what you say," he answered, soothing her. "You know you are not putting it fairly. You--"

"I know, I know," she interrupted. "I am shallow, I am unjust, I suppose I'm almost blasphemous. Forgive me if I've hurt you. Only, your God is so terrible. I believe in Him; but I'm frightened. He is nothing but grandeur and majesty. He will have no rebellion, He insists on everybody's homage all the time."

"He is Love, everlasting Love," said Antonio warmly, "and if any words of mine have made you doubt it, may He forgive me. I see the world's unbelief, first and foremost, as Love rejected; and if I am a monk it is in the hope that my whole life's prayers may perchance be one poor drop of balm poured into Love's wounds. But these matters are too weighty to be talked of like this. The origin of evil, the mystery of free-will--you have raised the problems that none can solve."

"Let us leave them alone," she pleaded. "I hate them. Deep down in my heart, I do not disbelieve. Before you had half finished your story, my pride was broken. Yes, when you pictured the chapel on the night you returned, and the moonlight lingering on the crown of Jesus, I knelt with you in spirit before that altar and words came back to my lips that I hadn't said since I was a child."

In exceeding thankfulness he was about to speak; but she hurried on.

"Antonio," she said, "if you send me away, perhaps you will think of me as a temptress--a woman raised up by the devil to blandish you aside from your holy purpose, and to lure you into trampling upon your vows. Promise you will never think of me like that. Kneeling here on my knees, I swear before God that I am not ... that."

She paused. Then, with her head bent so that he could not see her face, and in low tones, she added slowly:

"I have only wanted to be near you--to be with you, to spend all the rest of my life listening to you, helping you. Heaven knows there has never been for a moment anything ... anything base in my love. I know what most people mean by love and I loathe it. Tell me you don't misunderstand. Say you believe me. Promise you'll never think of me like that."

"I promise," said Antonio, deeply moved. And, try as he would, he could say no more.

After a long time she raised her head abruptly and challenged his eyes. By the pallor which blanched her cheeks he divined her question, and he knew that the bitterest moment of his life was come.

"So there is no room for me?" she asked in low, vibrating tones. "No room for Isabel as well as for your Bride? You send me away?"

He tried to be cool; but the flame of her pure heart's yearning so scorched him that he cried out:

"No, I do not send you away. It is not my will; it is God's. He knows, Isabel, He knows that all the sacrifices I have ever made and all the trials I have ever borne are as a few grains of dust compared with this. I do not send you away. But you must go. Our spirits are willing to take high and holy vows, here and now; but we are flesh and we are weak. You must go. You must. You will."

She arose slowly and stood upright. Instantly he did the same. He seized her hand; but before he could speak, she said quietly:

"I will go. After this, unless miracles happen, you will only see me with Mrs. Baxter or with my father. But, before I go, do me one little kindness. I promise that, so long as I live, it shall be a secret between us. I know your heart. Once, only once, let me hear you say that you love me."

Antonio knew that he loved her indeed, with a love whereof he had no cause to be ashamed, and that he must speak the three little words she craved. He began to frame a prudent preface which should precisely qualify them and empty them of all their association with profane passion. But his knightly blood stirred in time and saved him. Besides, he knew that he might safely speak the words and trust Isabel not to abuse them. He bent to her ear and said simply:

"I love you."

For a long moment she stood with closed eyes and did not stir. Then she gently freed her hand and moved away. Antonio followed her. Wherever the paths were wide enough they walked side by side; but although the way was long they did not speak. Here and there in the wood there were low boughs to be held aside, and once the monk had to lift her bodily across a little brook; but he did all these things as a matter of course, without a word. When the guest-house gleamed through the trees, Antonio halted and would have uttered the few sentences he had been arranging in his brain; but she silenced him with a gentle gesture and walked across the broad path, up the sunny steps, and through the wide-open doorway, without a glance behind.

VIII

Not more than two hours after Antonio's return to his farm a messenger arrived from the guest-house and handed in two letters. The first ran:

_Mrs. Baxter presents her compliments to Signor da Rocha and begs to request that he will call to-day without fail, as Mrs. B. is under the unpleasant obligation of making a painful communication to Signor R._

The second letter was shorter still. It contained the single line:

_I must see you too._

Antonio's amazement quickly gave place to indignation. He had examined his conscience concerning the whole business too often to deceive himself, and he knew that he was not to blame for what had happened. Yet here he was, summoned to endure a lecture from the vulgar Mrs. Baxter. Worse still, when Sir Percy came back he would be told the tale. Antonio would be regarded ever afterwards as an abuser of a sacred trust, a heartless trifler with young affections, an outsider, a brute, a cur fit for the horse-whip. And he would have to suffer all this injustice in silence, because he could only clear himself by disgracing the lady.

As he grew cooler the monk became certain that Isabel had not deliberately betrayed him to Mrs. Baxter. Probably she had broken down after her protracted excitements and had let slip some fatal admission in a moment of hysteria. Or perhaps a chattering servant had seen her walking with Antonio in the woods. Gravest possibility of all, some sharp eyes or ears might have detected her absence in the middle of the night. At this last thought he seized his hat and set out for the guest-house at once.

When he reached the road, still soft after the rain, some hoof-marks reassured him. He recognized them as the shoe-prints of Negro, an old post-horse ridden by the casual letter-carrier of Navares. News of some kind had evidently arrived from Sir Percy. Perhaps he was ill, or dying. The monk's heart melted towards Isabel as he perceived that new troubles were hurrying to smite her, and he would gladly have submitted to the bitter censures of Mrs. Baxter in their stead.

Isabel met him about fifty yards from the guest-house door. She looked more beautiful than ever, but her expression dismayed him. No traces lingered of the exaltation to which she had attained only a few hours before. She seemed proud, hard, defiant.

"We have heard from my father," she said quickly. "The unexpected--I mean the half-expected--has happened. We are to pack and go, as we have packed and gone from twenty places before. It isn't azulejos this time. It's a railway. But it'll be all the same in the end. He wants us to start for Lisbon the day after to-morrow. Mrs. Baxter will tell you everything."

To Antonio's surprise she neither referred to her note nor said a word on her personal account, but led him straight into the salon where Mrs. Baxter was seated in the midst of confusion. Isabel's pictures had already been removed from the walls, and Jackson could be heard in a back-room nailing down a packing-case. The noises fell on Antonio's heart like blows on a coffin-lid.

"I have learned, Madame, with concern, that you are compelled to undertake a fatiguing journey," said Antonio in his most formal style. "Let me repeat my assurance that I remain, at all times, entirely at your service."

"I'm sure you do, Signor, I'm sure you do," wailed Mrs. Baxter. "But tell me, Signor, what do you think of it all? I was saying, only this morning, how comforting it was that we were settled for life, and how delightful it would be to spend the rest of my days in the salubrious air of this favored spot, enlivened by the profitable conversation of a congenial neighbor."

Isabel listened to her governess with a scornful lip. What Mrs. Baxter had really said, only that morning, was that she had determined to write Sir Percy her mind at once; that, through the almost incredible deficiencies of the village shops and the unscriptural errors of Joanninha, she was being starved and poisoned, both in body and soul; that she had never stayed in such a hole before, and never meant to again; that, after enjoying the intimacy of some of the first personages in England, she found it intolerable to have only one neighbor, especially when he was only a small yeoman with no table-napkins and not enough forks to go round; and, finally, that she flatly declined to remain after Christmas in any Portuguese place save Lisbon or Oporto.

"The Senhora does me too much honor," said Antonio, without enthusiasm. "But this is not final? The Senhoras will return?"

"Sir Percival Kaye-Templeman never returns anywhere," snapped Mrs. Baxter, "I declare, Signor, that he drags me about like a slave. If it hadn't been for my death-bed promise to the sainted mother of that darling child sitting on the blue ottoman, I should have left him a thousand times."

The darling child arose from the blue ottoman and went to an escritoire. She opened a drawer and took something from it.

"Mrs. Baxter is forgetting to give you my father's letter," she said. "He tells us he has written to thank you for all you have done."

Antonio received the sealed letter into his hand; and, as neither of the ladies proffered him leave to read it in their presence, he placed it in his breast-pocket.

"For the present my father also begs you to take the keys of the abbey," added Isabel. "Here they are. He says he has explained everything in his letter. As for this guest-house, there are only two keys. We will give them to you when we go, on Thursday."

Antonio's heart leaped like a bird at her words about the abbey keys; but it sank like a stone as she said, "we go on Thursday." So violent was his agitation that, to cover it, he rose from his seat and advanced to the open drawer of the escritoire where the keys were lying. He dared not look at Isabel.

"If the chapel key is not here," she said, in an off-hand way, "you know where to find it."

She placed the bunch in his hand. There were about twenty keys, great and small, bright and dull, and they tinkled together pleasantly as Antonio carried them back to his place. But they sounded in his ears more like a far-heard knell than a merry chime.

"I suppose you must go now?" she inquired.

"My pet, my darling pet," expostulated Mrs. Baxter, looking daggers. "What on earth will Signor de Rocha think? He'll think you want to hunt him out of the house."

"So I do. There's a waterfall somewhere in the grounds. I want him, if he has time, to show me the way to it. A waterfall and stepping-stones. Perhaps, Mrs. Baxter, you will come with us."

"Stepping-stones!" gasped Mrs. Baxter. "Not if they were made of solid gold. Not if you paid me a million pounds. Why, you've quite forgotten, Isabel, darling, that if it hadn't been for stepping-stones, poor little Lady Margaret Barricott would be alive to-day!"

"Then you won't come? Senhor da Rocha, have you really the leisure to take me?"

"I have the leisure," answered Antonio formally. "And, if I had not, leisure should be made. Mrs. Baxter, I will send up my man to-morrow to assist you in the packing of your goods, and I will certainly attend you on Thursday. Meanwhile, I am your obedient servant."

Isabel was already in the ante-chamber and Antonio did not overtake her until she was descending the steps. Dangling the keys he walked beside her without speech until they reached the shelter of the trees. Then he drew from his pocket the long steel key of the chapel and halted a moment while he placed it among the others.

"You see that I had brought it," he said. "This morning I forgot to give it you."

"Pray don't explain," she commanded curtly. "We've had explanations enough and to spare."

He relocked the old-fashioned key-ring and they resumed their march, Isabel going first along the narrow path. Antonio felt thankful for the short respite from talk. He knew that he was on his way to the sharpest fight of all. Although there was nothing of love in Isabel's manner towards him, he divined that she had invited him to the cascade in order to overthrow him by some final argument or appeal.

Could he be sure that he would once more succeed in resistance? He took stock of his weapons and forces. In sheer dialectic he knew that he was Isabel's match; for the very slowness of his English gave him a certain advantage. Nor was he greatly her inferior in rhetorical resource. What he feared was Isabel's unconscious challenging of his chivalry. He did not dread the wiles of deliberate coquetry, even if she had been capable of practicing them; and, most emphatically, he did not dread the seductiveness of her physical charms, because the stern battle against the flesh was a battle he had fought and won long years before. But he dreaded, with a dread nearly driving him into cowardice, the hateful task of bringing hot tears into her cool blue eyes and of breaking her soft voice into heart-broken sobbings.

He glanced at Isabel as she pressed onward a yard or so ahead. As always, she was the soul and body of grace. The poise of her golden head upon her swan-white neck, her proud shoulders, her exquisite waist, her fine hands plucking at the autumn leaves, her little feet which seemed hardly to touch the earth--all these charms were as adorable as ever. Yet there was something unusual in her port and gait. Perhaps she was less willowy, more rigid. She advanced with a masterful air as if to say: "To-day there shall be no nonsense. I lead: you follow. You are mine to do as I please with. Until this afternoon I have indulged you as I might indulge a favorite young horse. I've let you just smell the halter and then go galloping off to the other end of the field. I've let you lead me a breathless dance through the buttercups and clover. But you have bucked and jibbed and bolted and neighed and tossed up your head and shaken out your mane and tail long enough. This time I mean to put the halter on. So let there be no mistake about it."

Antonio observed all this and was thankful. So long as she chose to be peremptory, scornful, logical, he was safe. The encounter, though painful, would not be perilous. But let her once soften and he was lost. He felt that, even with the remains of yesterday's miraculous grace in his heart, he would be powerless against a tear or a sob. His two sleepless nights and the unwonted stress of romantic emotions were wearing him down, and he inwardly prayed that he might not be tempted beyond what he would bear.

When she reached the pool, Isabel did not cross the stepping-stones. Halting some distance from the brawling waterfall, and hardly waiting for Antonio to approach her, she began:

"We have had many long talks at this pool. To-day's talk will be short. Surely I have crawled to you enough on my hands and knees, and I will do it no more."

Antonio said nothing.

"There's not an hour to lose," she went on. "If you and I are going to do the right thing, I must tell Mrs. Baxter to stop the packing at once. You jump! You turn pale. I suppose you're shocked to hear me call it the right thing. I can't help it. I must speak the truth. It is the right thing. And the opposite thing is not only wrong; it's wicked, it's blasphemous, it's a crime. No. Don't interrupt me. You needn't think we're going over all the old, old arguments again."

"You have changed your mind rather swiftly," said Antonio, refusing to be suppressed. "Barely four hours ago you seemed to acquiesce in--"

"In my fate," she said, with a bitter laugh. "So I did. You worked on my feelings. Don't think me coarse and brutal; but I'll give you one illustration. You spread for me your cloak. Do you think I didn't see how old it was? When I thought of that, and of all the hardships you'd suffered, my heart broke and I cried and cried and cried like a baby. But I've changed my mind. I admire you as much as ever; but I don't admire the way you are going on. A man like you ought to have the best cloak in the world, and all the rest of the best things with it. You are a poet, you are a delicate gentleman. I see it every time you pour out a drop of wine or touch a flower. You would rejoice in exquisite things more than any woman."

"Shall I offend you, Isabel?" he asked, coloring up, "if I remind you that this talk is to be short? We are not getting on."

"Yes, we are getting on fast," she retorted. "I say that I hate the way you are living. To save money and to buy back this place for the Benedictines is all very well; but I say that your sacrifices are overdone, and that God must be grieved by your excesses. He has shown that you are not meant to be a monk. He has driven your brethren away, and instead of them he has sent you ... _me_. No. I'm not conceited. I don't think I'm wonderful. But I'm your destiny, and that's everything. You were not called to monasticism; you were called to _me_. That is, you were called to be a monk only to save you from the wrong woman, only until the appointed day should dawn for you and me to meet. It has dawned. Yes, Antonio, I can quote Scripture, and I don't quote it irreverently either. The day has dawned. And 'To-day if ye will hear His voice, harden not your heart.' If you do, it will be a sin; just as I suppose it's a sin for a man to harden his heart against the call to be a monk."

"No more of this, I pray," cried Antonio. "If there is some great new fact, let us have it; but let us not hark back to what we have threshed out already."

"Very well," she said. "Here is the great new fact. My father. What did I tell you about him? I told you that his next experiment will kill him. But there's only one way of snatching him out of peril. Pardon me for telling you that this abbey is mine. It was bought with my money, and I am, to some extent, mistress of my father's movements in Portugal. If I flatly decline to leave here; if I pension off Mrs. Baxter; and if ... if you do what is right by yourself and by me; then, and only then, will my father come down from the clouds and look facts in the face. If I go back to Lisbon, I go back to kill him."

Deeply pained, Antonio raised a hand to stop her. She took a step forward and looked at him with steady eyes, but with trembling lips.

"Do you think, do you truly believe, that I would say a thing like this if it were not true?" she demanded in low, quivering tones. "Oh, Antonio, I have always known it. In your heart you despise me. You think I'm so far sunk in shamelessness that I am taking the name of God in vain and concocting lies about my father's life, so as to scare you into marrying me."

"Before Heaven, Isabel, I think no such foul thought," he answered solemnly. "But I am puzzled. If this abbey is yours, not his; and if you are mistress of his movements; why not assert your authority without dragging in me? Why not pension off Mrs. Baxter and get a companion from England? Why not despatch a post to Lisbon to-night informing your father that you will be no party to his new scheme, and that you insist on his recruiting quietly here?"

"And you?" she demanded.

"I? No doubt we should meet sometimes."

"No doubt, no doubt," she echoed with scorching scorn. "We should meet sometimes, and talk about the weather. You nearly make me hate you. Have you blood in your veins or water? Have you a heart in your breast or a cold stone? I tell you this is a crime, it is a blasphemy. You call it religion: I call it a black sin against God."

Her terrible earnestness challenged Antonio to answer once and for all.

"Isabel," he said sternly. "Crime and blasphemy are hard words. You speak of God. I will speak of God too. If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that God has called me to live this life which I am living, and to do this work which I am doing. I am more sure of it than I am of these rocks under our feet. As for your father, God knows that I do not speak heartlessly; but your father's life is in God's hands, not mine. You can rid yourself of Mrs. Baxter and compel him to rest in England without forcing me to break my vows."

"Your vows, your precious vows, always your vows!" she cried, in anger and great contempt.

"Yes," he retorted instantly, "my vows, always my vows. They are precious to me indeed, and I will beg you not to speak of them lightly."

She faced him with increasing anger. But, before she could speak, Antonio suddenly repented himself of his sharpness.

"Isabel," he said, in quieter tones. "Think. You despise me for keeping my vows. But suppose I had vowed my vows to you. And suppose I should break them, for some other woman. What then?"

"I would kill her. And you too."

For a moment her wrathful excitement hindered her logical perceptions; but as soon as she recognized his meaning she cried:

"It's different, all different! I'm real; your Bride isn't. Besides, She has deserted you. She's run away, or She's dead. You are free."

"No, Isabel," he said. "Think again. Suppose to-day I should vow my vow to you. Suppose your father, or someone else, should pluck you suddenly from my side so that I could never find you again. Nay, more. Suppose you were untrue to me and that you abandoned me. Would you have me say: 'She has gone. I shall never see her again. To-morrow I will seek another bride?' No, Isabel, no. If you say Yes, I shan't believe it. I know your soul too well. Even if you broke yours, my vow would still be there, and you would despise me for not keeping it. Am I right or wrong?"

He had unguardedly lowered his tones to a perilous tenderness, and he was unconsciously gazing at her with the gaze she could never resist. Her lips lost their hardness and began to tremble, and her eyelids drooped over her eyes.

Antonio involuntarily recoiled from the danger. He knew in an instant that his fate was quivering in the balance. His heart had bled at every harsh word he spoke to her; and he knew that to sweep away the last shaken ruins of his defenses, she needed only to throw herself weeping into his arms. He knew that if she should once sob out, "Antonio, Antonio, don't send me away," his doom would then and there be sealed.

All this Antonio knew. But Isabel did not know it. His sudden movement of recoil stung her back into anger.

"Are you right or wrong?" she echoed bitterly. "You're right, of course. You always are. Even when you're wrong fifty times over, you can argue yourself into the right. I call it cowardly."

He exhaled a deep breath. The peril was past. Her scorn he could withstand.

"I have come to the end," she cried. "The very end. Listen. You are blighting my life, but I won't let you blight your own. Mark me well. This place is mine. These lands are mine. I have the right to go to-night and to set the whole abbey ablaze; and where will your work be then?"

The threat did not alarm him; but the cruelty of it, coming from such lips as hers, cut him to the marrow. He was on the point of retorting that the place was not hers at all, and that her father had deceived her on a wretched point of money. But her anguish was bitter enough without this new mortification; so he held his peace.

"I can make a bonfire of it this minute," she went on passionately. "I hate it. How I should love to see it blaze! But I won't. And I won't sell this place. And when I've left it on Thursday, I'll never come back till you seek me on your knees. Never!"

Still Antonio held his peace. Isabel picked up her little bag. But she did not turn immediately towards home. She stood awaiting his final word. When it failed to come her indignation rose to its climax.

"No!" she cried. "I've altered my mind. I will come back. I foresee the end. You will never seek me. You hate me. But I will come back. You'll go on slaving, slaving, starving, starving, praying, praying, and breaking hearts in the name of God. But I will come back. You'll succeed. You'll regain the abbey. You'll fill it with monks. But remember. I will come back. On the day of your triumph, I will be there. It isn't only you Southern people who love revenge. I will be there. I will come back!"

Antonio had been silently praying for sudden grace in his own dire need; but he ceased to pray for himself and prayed with all his soul for her. She turned to go.

They stood facing one another as they had stood so often during these two bitter days of their ordeal. Try as he would the monk could not conceal his agony of holy love; and under the spell of his gaze the devil of revengeful hate which had entered into Isabel rent her poor heart and fled away. They looked at each other a long time. Then, in a breaking voice, she said softly:

"Antonio. I don't hate you. I love you. This is the very last time. Do you send Isabel away? Is it true that I must go?"

With a sharp moan of anguish and with hands thrust out for mercy he gave his answer.

"For the love of Jesus Christ," he cried. "Go! And may the merciful God help us both!"

He closed his eyes in desperate prayer. But God and the Virgin Mother and the whole company of heaven seemed to have forsaken him. No light shown, no supernal fortitude came down. Instead of a vision of ministering angels, his mind's eyes saw only Isabel. Isabel, standing there. Isabel, weeping. Isabel, wounded to death by his cruel sword. Isabel, hoping against hope for his mercy. Isabel, his Isabel, rarer than gold, lovelier than the dawn, purer than snow, waiting to dart like a bird into the nest of his love.

He could fight no longer. Stepping one staggering step forward he held out his arms and opened his eyes.

She had vanished.

A moment later he caught sight of her pressing up the path above him. She was going swiftly, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left. Now and again a ray of the sinking sun shone upon her hair, till she seemed a queen crowned or a saint glorified.

With all his heart Antonio yearned to leap after her, to capture her like a shy creature of the woods, and to bear her back in triumph, seated on his shoulder as she had sat after the thunderstorm. But his limbs refused to obey. His feet seemed to have been rooted for centuries in the granite. He could not move an inch.

Two cypresses, which they had often halted to admire, hid her from his sight. A groan, which he could not stifle, broke from the monk. There was one more point in the path, one only, where she could reappear. Would she turn round? Would she look back? As he waited, red-hot pincers seemed to be working and worming within him as if they would have his heart out of his body. He felt as if he were bleeding at every pore.

She reappeared. She did not turn round. She did not look back. She was gone.