When he tried to explain some of this to Ada she thought him mad. She saw no sign in the world around her of the Apocalypse he seemed to anticipate, and as he was extremely vague as to the form he expected it to take, whether war or revolution, and if war whether between nations, classes, or sexes, and if revolution whether of the workers, the intellectuals, or even the beasts of the field, she thought it likely that he was deranged, and consulted their trusted friend and neighbour the philosopher H. W. Brigginshaw. He after some consideration came to the conclusion that Cornelius was suffering from mania, and after further consideration that the mania was religious. He therefore put it to him that the logical course of action was to enter a monastery.

It is not easy for a man approaching late middle age to be accepted as a novice monk. The abbots whom Cornelius visited, while convinced of his fervour, doubted his capacity to withstand the physical hardships of a novice’s life. It was only when Cornelius, about to write to the Abbot of a monastery which incorporated a boys’ public school, recognized the name as that of a former schoolfellow and so reminded him in his letter of the rigours of their early years and pointed out that no novitiate could be harsher than that one, that he found someone disposed to look sympathetically on his aspirations.

He entered into his new life with enthusiasm. Arrangements were put in train for the dissolution of his marriage. (About this time H. W. Brigginshaw unexpectedly left the Hindhead district and moved to Hampstead; later on Ada married a vegetarian from Cheam.) Cornelius did not really achieve happiness in his new vocation until, it being one of the duties of the Order he had joined to provide a parish priest for the small congregation of Catholics in that part of Somerset where the monastery was situated, he was given this function, and finding himself in circumstances which suited his gregarious nature better than the more solitary life he had been leading within the monastery walls, he became more cheerful and even grew quite fat. He had the good fortune to find as the newly arrived local landowner a millionaire who had made great profit from the manufacture of armaments during the War and was now suffering from a troubled conscience. In no time Cornelius had interested him in any number of schemes. What with arranging interdenominational ecumenical conferences (to the alarm of his superiors and indeed of the authorities of all the Churches involved) and supporting the Peace Pledge, the Anti-Vivisection Society and Major Douglas’s Movement for Social Credit, Cornelius managed not only to relieve his patron of the burden of inordinate wealth, but to provide for himself in his declining years the happiness which comes from total conviction as to the usefulness of one’s work.

Cicely had been right; she never went to Hungary. It seemed to her that she had taken all the fine frivolities, the fur-lined sledges racing over the snow-covered plain, the waltz in the glass-walled ballroom, the wolf-hunt, the pinnacled castles, the sweeping curtsey to the Emperor himself, and heaped them like a great bundle of white flowers onto poor Tom Harker’s grave. She could not prevent herself from thinking sometimes that it had been rather a wonderful thing to have done.