It happened that Sir Charles had not accompanied the monks that Sunday; but in his place was an old priest who had spent the week-end as a guest in the Abbey and who had said Mass for the brethren that morning.  This had given Mark deep pleasure, because it was the Sunday after Esther’s profession, and he had been able to make his intention her present joy and future happiness.  He had been silent throughout the walk, seeming to listen in turn to Brother Dunstan’s rhapsodies about the forthcoming arrival of Brother George and Brother Birinus with all that it meant to him of responsibility more than he could bear removed from his shoulders; or to Brother Raymond’s doubts if it should not be made a rule that when no priest was in the Abbey the brethren ought to walk over to Wivelrod, the church Sir Charles attended four miles away, or to Brother Jerome’s disclaimer of Roman sympathies in voicing his opinion that the Office should be said in Latin.  Actually he paid little attention to any of them, his thoughts being far away with Esther.  They had chosen Hollybush Down for their walk that Sunday, because they thought that the view over many miles of country would please the ancient priest.  Seated on the short aromatic grass in the shade of a massive hawthorn full-berried with tawny fruit, the brethren looked down across a slope dotted with junipers to the view outspread before them.  None spoke, for it had been warm work in their habits to climb the burnished grass.  It would have been hard to explain the significance of that group, unless it were due to some haphazard achievement of perfect form; yet somehow for Mark that moment was taken from time and placed in eternity, so that whenever afterward in his life he read about the Middle Ages he was able to be what he read, merely by re-conjuring that monkish company in the shade of that hawthorn tree.

On their way back to the Abbey Mark found himself walking with Mr. Lamplugh, the ancient priest, who turned out to have known his father.

“Dear me, are you really the son of James Lidderdale?  Why, I used to go and preach at Lima Street in old days long before your father married.  And so you’re Lidderdale’s son.  Now I wonder why you want to be a monk.”

Mark gave an account of himself since he left school and tried to give some good reasons why he was at Malford.

“And so you were with Rowley?  Well, really you ought to know something about missions by now.  But perhaps you’re tired of mission work already?” the old priest inquired with a quick glance at Mark as if he would see how much of the real stuff existed underneath that probationer’s cassock.