f."

"Well, of course I'm not good," said Michael. "Only I think it's funny
for a monk to swear. You don't mind my saying so, do you?"

"I don't mind. I don't mind anything," said Brother Aloysius.

Tension succeeded this statement, a tension that Michael longed to
break; but he could do no more than continue to pick the blackberries.

"I suppose you wonder why I'm a monk?" demanded Brother Aloysius.

Michael looked at his questioner's pale face, at the uncomfortable eyes
gleaming blue, at the full stained mouth and the long feverish hands
dyed with purple juice.

"Why are you?" he asked.

"Well, I thought I'd try if anything could make me feel good, and then
you looked at me in Chapel and set me off again."

"I set you off?" stammered Michael.

"Yes, you with your big girl's eyes, just like a girl I used to live
with. Oh, you needn't look so proper. I expect you've often thought
about girls. I did at your age. Three months with girls, three months
with priests. Girls and priests--that's my life. When I was tired of
women, I became religious, and when I was tired of Church, I took to
women. It was a priest told me to come here to see if this would cure
me, and now, damn you, you come into Chapel and stare and set me
thinking of the Seven Sisters Road on that wet night I saw her last.
That's where she lives, and you look exactly like her. God! you're the
image of her. You might almost be her ghost incarnate."

Brother Aloysius caught hold of Michael's arm and spoke through clenched
teeth. In Michael's struggle to free himself the basket of blackberries
was upset, and they trod the spilt fruit into the grass. Michael broke
away finally and gasped angrily:

"Look here, I'm not going to stay here. You're mad."

He ran from the monk into the depths of the wood, not stopping until he
reached a silent glade. Here on the moss he sat panting, horrified. Yet
when he came to compose the sentences in which he should tell Dom
Cuthbert of his experience with the new monk, he found himself wishing
that he had stayed to hear more. He actually enjoyed in retrospect the
humiliation of the man, and his heart beat with the excitement of
hearing more. Slowly he turned to seek again Brother Aloysius.

"You may as well tell me some more, now you've begun," said Michael.

For three or four days Michael was always in the company of Brother
Aloysius, plying him with questions that sounded abominable to himself,
when he remembered