How far this was a popular superstition, and to what length his learning went, it is impossible to say.

But nobody ever came quite to the end of it.

He was a silent, modest man, who never spoke much of what he knew, or of himself in any wise.

His strongest outward characteristic was quietness, both of manner, speech, motions, springing, it appeared, out of a corresponding quietness of soul.
Whether it had been born with him, or through what storms of human passion and suffering he had attained to this permanent central calm, who could say?
Certainly nobody knew or was likely to know; for the Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could not be fathomed easily with any line.

Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by the right hand, had never been dropped yet.
As he sat, his grave eyes fixed on the ground, and his mouth covered by the long thin brown hand--the sort of hand you see in mediaeval portraits of student-gentlemen--nothing of him was discernible except the gentleman and the student.