He never guessed at any deeper poison at work far below, tainting the very waters at their source.
He was in all essential points an orthodox son of Rome; but he had imbibed much of the spirit of the Oxford Reformers, of whom Colet was at this time the foremost, and his more enlightened outlook seemed to the blind and bigoted of his own order to savour something dangerously of heresy.
He did not know himself seriously suspected.

His conscience was too clear, his devotion to the Church too pure, to permit of his easily fearing unworthy suspicions.

He knew himself no favourite with the stately but self-indulgent Prior of Chadwater; knew that Brother Fabian, whom he had once sternly rebuked for an act of open sin, was his bitter enemy.

But he had not greatly heeded this, strong in his own innocence, and he had been far happier at Chad in the more truly pure atmosphere of that secular house than in the so-called sanctity of the cloister.
And now he found his own thoughts, aspirations, and yearnings repeated in the mind of his favourite pupil, and he was confronted by a problem more difficult to solve than any that had met him before.

In his own case he felt he had a compass to steer by--the restraint and guidance of his vows and his habit to help him.