They were of all kinds, from the distinguished lay
leaders of the Catholic party to young men who thought emotionally of
joining the Order.
Mark tried to conduct himself as impersonally as possible, and in doing
so he managed to impress all the visitors with being a young man
intensely preoccupied with his vocation, and as such to be treated with
gravity and a certain amount of deference. Mark himself was anxious not
to take advantage of his position, and make friends with people that
otherwise he might not have met. Had he been sure that he was going to
remain in the Order of St. George, he would have allowed himself a
greater liberty of intercourse, because he would not then have been
afraid of one day seeing these people in the world. He desired to be
forgotten when they left the Abbey, or if he was remembered to be
remembered only as a guestmaster who tried to make the Monastery guests
comfortable, who treated them with courtesy, but also with reserve.
None of the young men who came down to see if they would like to be
monks got as far as being accepted as a probationer until the end of
May, when a certain Mr. Arthur Yarrell, an undergraduate from Keble
College, Oxford, whose mind was a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms,
was accepted and a month later became a postulant as Brother Augustine,
to the great pleasure of Brother Raymond, who said that he really
thought he should have been compelled to leave the Order if somebody had
not joined it with an appreciation of historic Catholicism.
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