the weight.

It was a poor, pathetic folly, but it brought the comfort of company, and
John thought with a pang of the time when he had wished to be separated
from Paul, and had all but asked for a cell elsewhere. Paul had a fire,
and John could hear him build and light and stir it; and sometimes when
this was done he could sit down himself before his own empty grate on his
own side of the wall and fancy they were good comrades sitting side by
side.

As the day passed he thought that Brother Paul on his part also was
touched by the same sense of company. His silence at certain moments, his
half-articulate salutations, his repetition of the sounds that John
himself made, seemed to be the dumb expression of a sense that, in spite
of the wall that divided them, and the rule of silence and solitude that
separated them on John's side, they were, nevertheless, together.

Brother Paul's cough grew rapidly worse, and at last it burst into a fit
so long and violent as to seem as if it would never end. John held his
breath and listened. "He'll suffocate," he thought; "he'll never live
through it!" But the spasm passed, and there was a prolonged hush, a dead
stillness, that was not broken by so much as the sound of a breath. Was
he gone? By a sudden impulse, in the agony of his suspense, John
stretched out his hand and knocked three times on the wall.

There was a short silence, and then faintly, slowly, and irregularly
three other knocks came back to him.

Paul had understood, and John shouted in his joy. But even on top of his
relief came his religious fears. Had he broken the rule of silence? Were
they guilty of a sin?

Nevertheless, for many days thereafter, though they knew it was a fault,
in this vague and dumb and feeble fashion they communicated constantly.
On going to bed they rapped "Good-night": on rising for the day they
rapped "Good-morning." They rapped when the bell rang for midday service,
and again when the singing came up through the courtyard. And sometimes
they rapped from sympathy and sometimes from pity, and sometimes from
mere human loneliness and the love of company.

Thus did these exiles from life, struggling to live under the eye of God
in obedience to their earthly vow, try to cheer their crushed and
fettered souls, and to comfort each other like imprisoned children.

XVI.

"The Priory, St. John's Wood, London.

"Behold, all men and women at Glenfaba, I have made one further change in