“The name you go by, eh?...  Where were you educated?”

“Eton and Cambridge.”

“How do you come to be on the roads?”

“That’s a long story, father.”

“Did you do anything you shouldn’t?”

“No.  But I’ve been in prison since.”

“And your name’s Frank Gregory....  F.G., eh?”

Frank turned as if to leave.  He understood that he was known.

“Well—­good-night, father—­”

The priest turned with upraised hand.

“Brother James, just step outside.”

Then he continued as the door closed.

“You needn’t go, Mr.—­er—­Gregory.  Your name shall not be mentioned to a living being without your leave.”

“You know about me?”

“Of course I do....  Now be sensible, my dear fellow; go and fetch your friends.  We’ll manage somehow.” (He raised his voice and rapped on the table.) “Brother James ... go up with Mr. Gregory to the porter’s lodge.  Make arrangements to put the woman up somewhere, either there or in a gardener’s cottage.  Then bring the man down here....  His name?”

“Trustcott,” said Frank.

“And when you come back, I shall be waiting for you here.”

(III)

Frank states in his diary that an extraordinary sense of familiarity descended on him as, half an hour later, the door of a cell closed behind Dom Hildebrand Maple, and he found himself in a room with a bright fire burning, a suit of clothes waiting for him, a can of hot water, a sponging tin and a small iron bed.

I think I understand what he means.  Somehow or other a well-ordered monastery represents the Least Common Multiple of nearly all pleasant houses.  It has the largeness and amplitude of a castle, and the plainness of decent poverty.  It has none of that theatricality which it is supposed to have, none of the dreaminess or the sentimentality with which Protestants endow it.  He had passed just now through, first, a network of small stairways, archways, vestibules and passages, and then along two immense corridors with windows on one side and closed doors on the other.  Everywhere there was the same quiet warmth and decency and plainness—­stained deal, uncarpeted boards, a few oil pictures in the lower corridor, an image or two at the turn and head of the stairs; it was lighted clearly and unaffectedly by incandescent gas, and the only figures he had seen were of two or three monks, with hooded heads (they had raised these hoods slightly in salutation as he passed), each going about his business briskly and silently.  There was even a cheerful smell of cooking at the end of one of the corridors, and he had caught a glimpse of two or three aproned lay brothers, busy in the firelight and glow of a huge kitchen, over great copper pans.

The sense of familiarity, then, is perfectly intelligible:  a visitor to a monastery steps, indeed, into a busy and well-ordered life, but there is enough room and air and silence for him to preserve his individuality too.