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sideboard—the pudding being cold— the cook said good night and departed, plainly for home. It was Robert who served everything, silently, unobtrusively and attentively. Once there had been some four or five servants living in at the Abbey; now there was Robert, and Robert was everything. Dinah tried to imagine Hugh shouldering this load, tamed into this grey tameness, and the picture was so absurd as to be almost indecent.
    Mrs. Macsen-Martel could even say: “I’m so glad you find the veal to your liking, Miss Cressett,” in such a way as to make Dinah feel that she had been eating like a hungry wolf. And indeed she was hungry; emotional excitement always had that effect on her.
    “It’s really excellent,” she said defensively, and turned on Robert with the first thing that entered her head. After all, that celebrated door was the chief event of the past week in Mottisham, what could be more natural than to show curiosity about it?
    “I’ve been dying to ask you about that door you gave back to the church. It’s almost the only thing—I mean apart from bits of the stone fabric—that’s left from the Gothic church, isn’t it? The rebuilders in the last century finished off almost everything else that survived. So it’s really very important, being local work, too. With a long history like that, it must have some legends attached to it, hasn’t it?”
    Robert seemed to emerge with a spasmodic effort from the glum abstraction into which he sank between his bouts of hospitable assiduity. She saw his long bones convulsed for an instant as he hauled himself back into awareness of her.
    “They might be anything but true,” he said with evident reluctance. “They do exist, yes, but only as legends.”
    “My dear,” murmured the old lady, her thin brows elevated into her dust-coloured hair. “The cellar door? Legends? I’ve never heard that it was anything more than a
door
. What legends?”
    “There isn’t any documentary evidence, how could there be?” Robert sounded tired, but as always, obliging. “The abbey library was quite simply bundled out and burned, so we shall never know whether there were any written records. Probably not, the abbey had a blameless reputation up to the fifteenth century, its decline was part of the general rot that was partly responsible for the Dissolution—or at least for the ease and general consent with which it was carried out. And what was in the chronicles was usually a hundred years past—by the end there weren’t any chroniclers. I doubt if the last four could write English, much less Latin.”
    “You mean it’s true,” asked Dinah, astonished, “that there were only four brothers left here at the end, and they weren’t any model of holiness?”
    “They were anything but. And for that there
is
good evidence. You know something about the end of the abbey, men?”
    “I didn’t,” she admitted honestly, “except that they were talking about it in ”The Sitting Duck‘ on Sunday night.”
    “They?”
    “Saul Trimble,” Hugh supplied with a reminiscent grin. “And believe me, he shouldn’t be underestimated. The essence of his nonsense is that about sixty per cent of it at least is good sense. It makes it more baffling. Even sceptics make inquiries, and get converted.”
    “Quite a lot of the monastic houses had degenerated badly by that time,” Robert said, “especially the more remote ones that were a law to themselves. And ours was pretty remote. This tale about the church door belongs towards the end. They say one of the brothers—there must have been more than four then—had made the classic pact with the devil, signing away his soul in return for diabolical help in this world, especially at raising spirits, and then tried to back out of the bargain at the crucial hour by taking refuge in the church. But wherever he tried to enter, the doors remained barred against him. In his despair he fell on his knees in the south porch and clutched at