"_Pax vobiscum_!" said I, bowing.
"Be at the Inquisition Chamber, directly the clock strikes the midnight
hour," he said mysteriously.
"I shall be there to deliver the supreme interrogation," I replied.
"It is well." He drifted away like a stately ship.
Delightful foolery! I saw the Jesuit, and moved toward him.
"Disciple of Loyola, hast thou the ten of hearts?"
"My hearts number nine, for I have lost one to the gay Columbine."
"I breathe! Thou art not he whom I seek."
We separated. I was mortally glad that Columbine had made a mistake.
The women always seek the monk at a masquerade; they want absolution
for the follies they are about to commit. A demure Quakeress touched
my sleeve in passing.
"Tell me, grave monk, why did you seek the monastery?"
"My wife fell in love with me,"--gloomily.
"Then you have a skeleton in the clothes-press?"
"Do I look like a man who owned such a thing as a clothes-press, much
less so fashionable a thing as a family skeleton?"
"Then what do you here?"
"I am mingling with fools as a penance."
A fool caught me by the sleeve and batted me gaily over the head with a
bladder.
"Merry come up, why am I a fool?"
"It is the fashion," was my answer.
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