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Sending for the abbot, he gave instructions for memorial services. “My visits here do me no good,” he said. “What good is it to grieve? I think we should move this house to your monastery and do it over as a memorial hall. Something of the sort will be necessary someday, I am quite sure, and the sooner the better.”

He drew sketches and they discussed the arrangement of chapels, galleries, and cells.

“A most admirable undertaking,” said the abbot.

“Some will think it cruel, I know, to change a house that has so much of its owner in it. But we have pious motives that would have accorded completely with his own. His great trouble seems to have been an inability to pursue them, out of concern for the daughters he would leave behind. This land will have passed through his second daughter to Prince Niou, and we are hardly in a position to make it a holy precinct, whatever our personal wishes in the matter may be. And of course it is too near the river and too open, and so I think we should move the house and have something else put up in its place.”

“In every respect a most excellent plan. There once was a man who lost his children and in his grief went for long years carrying their remains in a kerchief around his neck. Then through the benign powers of the Blessed One he cast them away and entered the realm of enlightenment.* For you this house is similarly disquieting, a barrier along the holy way. A temple will be a source of grace in lives to come. Let us get to work immediately. We will have the soothsayers choose a good day and find two or three carpenters who know what they are about, and in matters of detail we need only follow the specifications laid down by the Blessed One himself.”