was an august dignity on his face that Chris had never seen there
before.

Outside the night was still and frosty; only now and again the heavy
stroke of the bell told the town that a soul was passing.

Dom Augustine had received Viaticum an hour before. Chris had heard the
steady tinkle of the bell, like the sound of Aaron's garments, as the
priest who had brought him Communion passed back with his sacred burden,
and Chris had fallen on his knees where he stood as he caught a glimpse
of the white procession passing back to the church, their frosty breath
going up together in the winter night air, the wheeling shadows, and the
glare of the torches giving a pleasant warm light in the dull cloister.

But all that was over now, and the end was at hand.

As Chris knelt there, mechanically responding to the prayers on which
the monk's soul was beginning to lift itself and flutter for escape,
there fell a great solemnity on his spirit. The thought, as old as
death, made itself real to him, that this was the end of every man and
of himself too. Where Dom Augustine lay, he would lie, with his past
behind him, of which every detail would be instinct with eternal import.
All the tiny things of the monastic life--the rising in time for the
night office, attention during it, the responses to grace, the little
movements prescribed by etiquette, the invisible motions of a soul that
had or had not acted for the love of God, those stirrings, falls,
aspirations, that incessant activity of eighty years--all so incredibly
minute from one point of view, so incredibly weighty from another--the
account of all those things was to be handed in now, and an eternal
judgment given.