vestments is offering the solemn sacrifice of the Mass
for the repose of the soul of one whom Paul had loved dearly ever since
he was a child. There is one chief mourner kneeling before the altar--it
is Paul Clitheroe.

When the Mass is over, while the exquisite silence of the place is
broken only by the occasional note of some bird lodging in the branches
of the trees without, Paul lingers in profound meditation. He is not at
all the Paul whom we knew but a few months ago; through some mysterious
influence he seems to have cast off his careless youth, and to have
become a grave and thoughtful man.

From the chapel he wanders into the quiet library on the opposite side
of a cloister, where the flowers grow in tangle, and a fountain splashes
musically night and day, and the birds build and the bees swarm among
the blossoms. Now we see him chatting with the Fathers as they stroll up
and down in the sunshine; now musing over the graves of the Franciscan
Friars who founded the early missions on the Coast; now dreaming in the
ruins of the orchard--wandering always apart from the novices and the
scholastics, who sometimes regard him curiously as if he were not wholly
human but a kind of shadow haunting the place.

His heart grew warm and mellow as he sat by the adobe wall under the
red-baked Spanish tiles, richly mossed with age, and contemplated the
statue of the Madonna in the trellised shrine overgrown with passion
flowers. There were votive offerings of flowers at her feet, and he laid
his tribute there from day to day. Neither did he neglect to pay his
visit to the shrine of St. Joseph, in the cloister, or St. Anthony of
Padua, whom he loved best of all, and whose statue stood under the
willows by the great pool of gold fish.

He used to count the hours and the quarter hours as they chimed in the
belfry and he was beginning to grow fond of the inexorable routine and
to find it passing sweet and restful.

He was unconsciously falling into a mode of life such as he had never
known before, and he seemed to feel a growing repugnance to the world
without him; how very far away it seemed now! He realized an increasing
sense of security so long as he lodged within those gates. His dark
robed companions, the amiable Fathers, cheered him, comforted him,
strengthened him; and yet when his ghostly father one day sent word to
Clitheroe that he desired to see him immediately, and thereupon insisted
that the heart-broken boy acc