Mrs. Rutherford and Vera drove to the hill behind the Medici Villa in the golden light of a Roman November, when the gardens on the height were glowing with foliage that seemed made of fire, and only cypress and ilex showed dark against that splendour of red and amber; but to those two women all that beauty of autumn colour, and purple distances, of fairy-like gardens, and flashing fountains, was part of a world that was dead. The metaphysician's idea of the universe as an emanation of the individual mind is so far borne out by experience, that in a great grief the universe ceases to exist.

The room to which one of the brotherhood led them faced the western sky and was full of golden light when the two women entered.

It was a room that had once been splendid; but of all its splendour nothing was left but vast space, and the blurred and faded outlines of a fresco upon the ceiling.

The two women stood within the doorway looking to the other end of the room, where a solitary figure was sitting, huddled in a large armchair, in front of a fireplace that looked like an open tomb, where a little heap of smouldering logs upon a spacious hearth seemed a hollow mockery of a fire meant for warmth. That crouching form with contracted shoulders, and wasted hands stretched above the feeble fire-glow—could that be Claude Rutherford?

Vera shivered in the chillness of the dismal scene, where even the vast window, and the golden west, could not relieve the sense of cold and gloom.

Yes, it was Claude! He started to his feet as Mrs. Rutherford moved slowly along the intervening space. He looked beyond her, surprised at the second figure, and then, with one brief word to his mother, hurried past her and came to Vera.

He clasped her hands, he drew her towards the window, drew her into the golden light, where she stood transfigured, like the Madonna in a picture by Fra Angelico, glorious and all gold.

He looked at her as a traveller who had been dying of thirst in a desert might look at a fountain of clear water.

It was a long, long look, in which it seemed as if he were drinking the beauty of the face he looked at, as if, in those moments, he tried to satisfy the yearning of days and nights of severance. It seemed as if he could never cease to look; as if he could never let her go. Then suddenly he dropped her hand, and turned from her to his mother, who was standing a little way off.

"Why have you done this?" he asked vehemently.

"Because you would not listen to me. No prayers, no tears of mine would move you. I was breaking my heart, and I thought she might prevail when I failed; I knew her influence over you, and that she might move you."

"It was a cruel thing to do. I knew she was in Rome, that we were breathing the same air. The thought of her was with me by day and night. Yet I was rock. I made myself iron, I clung to the cross, like the saints of old time, who had all been sinners. Vera, why have you come between me and my God?"

"I could not see your mother so unhappy and refuse to do what she asked. Oh, Claude, forget that I came here. Forget that we have ever clasped hands since—since you resolve to separate yourself from the world. I will not come between you and the saving of your soul."

"Vera," Mrs. Rutherford cried passionately, "have you no compassion for me? Is this how you help me?"

"You know that I refused, that I did not want to see him. I ought never to have come. But it is over. We shall never meet again, Claude. This is the last—the very last."

"Heartless girl. Have you no thought of my grief?" urged the mother.

"No, not when I think of him. If you can come between him and his hope of heaven—I cannot." She turned and walked quickly to the door without another word. Mrs. Rutherford cast one despairing look at her son, before she followed the vanishing figure, muttering, "Cruel, cruel, a heart of stone!"

No words were exchanged between the two women as they left the monastery, conducted by the monk, who had waited for them in the stony corridor at the top of the broad marble stairs. He let them out of the heavy iron-lined door, into the neglected garden, where a long row of cypresses showed dark against a saffron sky. The greater part of the garden had been utilised for growing vegetables, upon which the brotherhood for the most part subsisted. Huge orange-red pumpkins sprawled among beds of kale, and patches of Indian corn were golden amidst the rusty green of artichokes gone to seed.

It was a melancholy place, and the aspect of it sent an icy chill through Mrs. Rutherford's heart as she thought of that light, airy temperament which had been her son's most delightful gift, the gay insouciance, the joyous outlook that had made him everybody's favourite. He the jester, the trifler, for whom life was always play-time, he to be shut within those frozen walls, immured in a living grave! It was maddening even to think of it. She had talked to him of his religious duties. Oh, God, was it her old woman's preaching that had brought him to this living death?

Vera bade her good-bye at the gate, saying that she would rather walk than drive, and left Mrs. Rutherford to return to her hotel alone.

"I wonder which of us two is the more unhappy?" she thought. "Why do I wonder? What is her misery measured against mine?"

For Claude a night of fever followed that impassioned meeting, a night of sleeplessness and semi-delirium. For the first time since he had been a visitor in that house of gloom he got up at two o'clock and went to the chapel, where the monks met for prayer and meditation at that hour. As a probationer making his retreat he was not subject to the severe rules of the order, and he need not leave his bed till four o'clock unless he chose. This night he went to the dimly-lighted chapel, and knelt on the chill stone, for respite from agonising thoughts, from the insidious whispers of the tempter. This night he went into the House of God to escape from the dominion of Satan.

Hitherto he had borne his time of probation with a stoical submission. He had sought no relaxation of the rule for penitents on the threshold. He had lain upon the narrow bed and shivered in the chilly room, and risen in the winter dark, to lie down again sleepless, at an hour when a little while ago his night of pleasure would have been still at full tide. He had submitted to the repellent fare, the vegetables cooked in half rancid oil, coarse bread and gritty coffee. He, who had been always a creature of delicate habits, accustomed to the uttermost refinement in every detail of daily life—his food, his toilet, his surroundings.

He had shrunk from no burden that was laid upon him, earnestly intent upon keeping his promise to Father Hammond. He was to spend six weeks in this place of silence and prayer, and at the end of that time he was to make his confession to the Superior, and to make his communion. Then would follow the slow stages of preparation for the final act, which would admit him to the brotherhood, and shut the door of the world upon all the rest of his life. He had learnt to think of that awful change with a stoic's resignation. He had brought himself to a Roman temper. He thought with indifference of the world which he was to renounce. He had done with it. This had been the state of his mind as he shivered over the smouldering olive logs. This iron calm, and his stony contempt for life, had been his till that moment of ecstasy when the woman he loved stood before him, a vision of ethereal beauty in the light of the setting sun.

Why had she come there? Why? The penitential days and nights, the stoic's iron resolve, all were gone in one breath from those sweet lips, faint and pale, but ineffably beautiful.