noon
There was a dreary chill in the chapel and the corridors , and he passed rapidly through them into the delightfully steep and tangled old garden which runs wild over the forehead of the great hill . He had been in it before , and he was very fond of it . The garden hangs in the air , and you ramble from terrace to terrace and wonder how it keeps from slipping down , in full consummation of its bereaved forlornness , into the nakedly romantic gorge beneath . It was just noon when Rowland went in , and after roaming about awhile he flung himself in the sun on a mossy stone bench and pulled his hat over his eyes . The short shadows of the brown-coated cypresses above him had grown very long , and yet he had not passed back through the convent . One of the monks , in his faded snuff-colored robe , came wandering out into the garden , reading his greasy little breviary . Suddenly he came toward the bench on which Rowland had stretched himself , and paused a moment , attentively .