the cloister. Hope being dead in life, they tasted refreshment in the
hope of a life to come. The convent was good enough for the bankrupt of
love and war. But there must be another rule for those in whom youth
was wounded but not dead, whose hearts were offended but not slain,
whose blood was still strong and hot for good and evil, for men whose
battles were before them still. There must be a remedy against fate
which should not be an offence to God, a struggle against God's will
which should not be a revolt, a life in which virtue should not mean a
prison for soul and body, nor the hope of salvation a friar's cell.

Like many enthusiasts, knowing nothing of the world save by guesswork,
and full of an inborn belief in the existence of perfection, Gilbert
dreamed of realizing the harmony of two opposites--the religious life
and the life of the world. Such dreams seemed not so wild in those
days, when the very idea of knighthood was based upon them, and when
many brave and true men came near to making them seem anything but
fanciful, and practised virtue in a rough-and-ready fashion which would
not pass muster in modern society, though it might in heaven. The
religious idea had taken hold of Gilbert strongly, and before he had
left the abbey he had fallen into the habit of attending most of the
offices in the choir, still wearing the novice's frock which had been
at first but an invalid's robe. And now that he was out in the world to
seek his fortunes, tunic and hose, spur and glove, seemed strange to
him, and he would have felt more at home in a friar's hood. So he felt
that in his life he should never again quite lose the monastic
instinct, and that it was well for him that he could not. He stood on
that perilous thin ridge between past and future to which almost every
man of heart is sooner or later led by fate, where every step may mean
a fall, and where to fall is almost to be lost. The things he had lived
for, the things he had hoped, the things he had loved, had been taken