When Foley went the next day to Sutton's lodgings, he was told that
Sutton had already left Oxford; had gone away early that morning. Where
he had gone, however, no one seemed to know. Certainly Foley never found
out; he never saw Sutton again, nor, in spite of all his inquiries, did
he ever hear anything but the most vague and uncertain news about him.
Abel said he had never gone back to Parnassus City. And then, years
after, it was reported that an Oxford man, when visiting some old shrine
in Italy, had recognized, or thought he recognized, Sutton in the monk
who showed him about the church.
Foley never got rid of a certain feeling of remorse, a sense that at the
beginning he had too lightly interfered in the life of the young
Dissenter.
But then he would tell himself, that it was probably after all nothing
less than Oxford itself, with its old ways and memories, that had
gradually changed and influenced the American. Influenced him not for
good, surely! he thought. And indeed, remembering Sutton's slow
estrangement from his early ideas and friends, his poor attempts to
remain faithful, the trouble and mystery in which he had disappeared at
last, Foley would ask himself, (and he took a strange sort of pleasure
in the question,) whether there were not something really dangerous in
the venerable and Gothic beauty of Oxford, a chill in the old shadows,
an iron sound in the bells.
_The Will to Live_