scent of the flowers that grew in the cloister garden; and the
indescribable sense of peace descended upon his body and soul which
comes to men wrested from death, when danger is passed and their
strength is slowly growing again within them.

It is impossible for any young man of sensitive and believing mind to
spend two months in a great religious institution of his own faith
without feeling himself drawn to the religious life. Lying in his room,
alone for many hours of the day, alone in waking watches of the night,
though a brother was always within call, Gilbert had followed with a
sick man's second sight the lives of the two hundred monks who dwelt in
Sheering Abbey. By asking questions, he knew how they rose at dawn, and
trooped into the dim abbey church to early mass, and went to their
daily work, the lay-brethren and novices in the field, the learned
fathers in the library and the writing-room. He could follow their
daily round of prayer and work, and his heart was with them in both.
Bloodless and emaciated as he lay there, the life of love and war which
had once seemed to him the only one worth living, faded away into the
dimness of an undesired impossibility. He had failed, too, in his first
great deed of arms; his father's murderer was alive, and he himself had
most narrowly escaped death. It seemed to him that his thin white
hands, which could hardly pull the blanket to his chin when he felt
cold, could never again have strength to grasp sword-hilt or hold
bridle, and in the blank collapse of his physical existence the image
of himself as a monk, young, ascetic and holy in his life, presented
itself with a marvellous and luring attraction. He made the nursing
brother teach him prayers from the offices of the night and day, and he
repeated them at the right hours, feeling that he was taking a real
part in the monastic existence. Gradually, too, as he caught the spirit
of the place, the gospel of forgiveness, ever the stumbling-block of