ll hands
and feet, everything about him was too much chiseled, overdelicate.
Sitting still, he might have been taken for a very pretty girl
masquerading in male attire; but when he moved, his lithe agility
suggested a tame panther without the claws.

"Is that really it? What should I do without you, Arthur? I should
always be losing my things. No, I am not going to write any more now.
Come out into the garden, and I will help you with your work. What is
the bit you couldn't understand?"

They went out into the still, shadowy cloister garden. The seminary
occupied the buildings of an old Dominican monastery, and two hundred
years ago the square courtyard had been stiff and trim, and the rosemary
and lavender had grown in close-cut bushes between the straight box
edgings. Now the white-robed monks who had tended them were laid away
and forgotten; but the scented herbs flowered still in the gracious
mid-summer evening, though no man gathered their blossoms for simples
any more. Tufts of wild parsley and columbine filled the cracks between
the flagged footways, and the well in the middle of the courtyard was
given up to ferns and matted stone-crop. The roses had run wild, and
their straggling suckers trailed across the paths; in the box borders
flared great red poppies; tall foxgloves drooped above the tangled
grasses; and the old vine, untrained and barren of fruit, swayed from
the branches of the neglected medlar-tree, shaking a leafy head with
slow and sad persistence.

In one corner stood a huge summer-flowering magnolia, a tower of dark
foliage, splashed here and there with milk-white blossoms. A rough
wooden bench had been placed against the trunk; and on this Montanelli
sat down. Arthur was studying philosophy at the university; and,
coming to a difficulty with a book, had applied to "the Padre" for an
explanation of the point. Montanelli was a universal encyclopaedia to
him, though he had never been a pupil of the seminary.

"I had better go now," he said when the passage had been cleared up;
"unless you want me for anything."

"I don't want to work any more, but I should like you to stay a bit if
you have time."

"Oh, yes!" He leaned back against the tree-trunk and looked up through
the dusky branches at the first faint stars glimmering in a quiet
sky. The dreamy, mystical eyes, deep blue under black lashes, were an
inheritance from his Cornish mother, and Montanelli turned his head
away, that he might not