and cropped the herbage between the boulders.

Stretching from side to side was the white abbey, not so much imposing
for architectural beauty, but because of its vast size, its Titanic
retaining walls and multitude of windows, now mere splashed oblongs of
darkness irregularly scattered along the white walls. Only at one end
the chapel was lit up, and from its windows of palest gold, and Madonna
blue, and ruby red, came the sweet voices of children beginning to sing
the evening hymn as it stands in the Breviary for the use of the
faithful in the arch-diocese of Tarragona--

"Rosasque miscens liliis.
Aram vetustam contegit."

CHAPTER VI

BROTHER HILARIO

At the great entrance gate they paused, uncertain which way to turn, for
from the windows of the chapel a bright light shone forth upon the grey
waste without, whitening alike the dark green creepers of the juniper
and the pale yellow spears of the restless broom. But a chance encounter
decided the matter for them.

"Well, ah, my good sometime enemy," cried a shrill eager voice, "have
you forgotten Etienne de Saint Pierre, and how we are to fight below the
windmill at Montmartre the first time you come to Paris?"

"Lord, it is the hare-brained Frenchman!" cried Rollo, yet with some
glow of pleasure in his face. The very talk of fighting stirred him.

"Then there are a pair of you!" said John Mortimer, quietly, like a man
dropping his fly into a pool on a clear evening.

"Eh, what's that?" angrily cried the Scot, but was diverted from further
inquiry by the sight of a figure that darted forward out of the darkness
of the wall.

A smallish slender man, dressed in a costume which would have recalled
the Barber of Seville, had it not been for the ecclesiastical robe that
surmounted and as it were extinguished its silken gorgeousness. A great
cross of gold set with jewels swung at the young man's breast and was
upheld by links as large as those which sustain a lord mayor's badge of
office.

"Ah, I have renounced the world, my dear adversary," cried the new-comer
enthusiastically, "as you will also. I am no longer Etienne de Saint
Pierre, but Brother Hilario, an unworthy novice of the Convent of the
Virgin of Montblanch!"

"But, sir," cried Rollo Blair, "you cannot take up the religious life
without some small settlement with me. You are trysted to meet me with
the smallsword at the Buttes of Montmartre--you to fight for the honour
of Senorita