their meeting long delayed, for a sickness fell among the people of
the valley, and Abul Malek, being skilled in medicine, went out to
minister among the poor, according to his religion. At the sick-bed of
a shepherd the two men came face to face.

Joseph was not young, nor was he old, but rather he had arrived at the
perfect flower of his manhood, and his placid soul shone out through
features of unusual strength and sweetness. In him the crafty Moor
beheld a difference which for a time was puzzling. But eventually he
analyzed it. The other monks had once been worldly men--they showed it
in their faces; the countenance of Fray Joseph, on the contrary, was
that of a boy, and it was without track of temptation or trace of
evil. He had lived a sheltered life from his earliest youth, so it
transpired, and Abul Malek rejoiced in the discovery, it being his
belief that all men are flesh and that within them smolder flames
which some day must have mastery. If this monk had never let his youth
run free, if he had never met temptation and conquered it, those
pent-up forces which inhabit all of us must be gathering power, year
by year, and once the joint of this armor had been found, once it
could be pierced, he would become earthly like other men, and his
false religion would drop away, leaving him naked under the irksome
garb of priesthood.

Accordingly, the Moor tested Fray Joseph, as he had tested the Abbot
and the others, but to no avail, and he was in despair, until one day
the secret of his failure was unexpectedly revealed.

Being busied with his accounts, he had repaired to the shade of a
pomegranate grove near the cliff, the better to escape the heat; while
so engaged up the path from the monastery came the good brother. Just