“It is a shrine.  Part of the cross still remains surmounting a fragment of a wall.”

He climbed into the coach and was about to give the word to start again, when Betty spoke up, hesitatingly, pleadingly but emphatically:—­

“Please wait a moment.  I want to see it.”

I followed Betty when she got out of the coach, and, as we approached the shrine, she exclaimed:  “Doctor Lilly was right!  There is no snow on the shrine.  The Virgin protects it.  There must be a relic beneath the stones!”

We climbed a little hillock and after standing before the shrine for a moment, Betty said, “Please return to the coach and leave me alone.”

“Why, Betty?” I asked.  “You may speak plainly to me.  I think I know your motive.”

“I want to offer a little prayer to the Virgin here at her broken shrine—­a prayer for your cousin and for you—­and for me.”

I knelt with her, and after Betty had finished her simple invocation, we rose, and I, who at another time would have laughed at the prayer, felt the thrill of her whispered words lingering in my heart.  I seemed to know that we should rescue Frances, and I also knew that my love for Bettina would bring me nothing but joy, softened and sanctified by sadness, and to her nothing of evil save the pain of a gentle longing.

Betty felt as I did, for when she rose she said, “Now we shall find Mistress Jennings, and, Baron Ned, I shall fear you no more.”

“Have you feared me?” I asked, touched to the quick by her artless candor.

“Yes,” she answered, sighing.  “Though I have feared myself more.  You are so far above me in every way that it is no wonder I am bewildered when you say—­say—­that you—.  You know what I mean.”

“Yes, Betty,” I answered quickly, feeling that she had more to say.

“I was bewildered in my parlor at the Old Swan to-day,” she said, hanging her head.  “Your opinion of me must have fallen.”

“No, no, I understood, Betty, I understood, and I dare not tell you how much my opinion has risen because I would say more than would be good for you or for me,” I answered reassuringly.

“But you must remember that a girl has impulses and yearnings at times, and she should not be too harshly blamed if she sometimes fails to beat them down.  But now it will all be different.  The Blessed Virgin will help us, and our conflict is over.”

Betty and I started back to the coach, both feeling the uplift of our answered prayer.  Probably we were the only devotees that had knelt before the shrine in hundreds of years, and the Virgin had heard our supplication.  It was a proposition I should have laughed at and held to scorn prior to that time.

After leaving the shrine, it was only a few minutes till the coach turned to the left into a narrow road, and we were approaching the end of our rough journey.  We continued to travel at a brisk trot and came to the forest, “dark and wild,” of which Lilly had spoken.  Thus far his “calculations” were correct, and I was beginning to take hope that they would continue so to the end.  After half an hour on the winding road through the forest, the drivers halted at the gate of which Lilly had spoken, and in ten minutes more drew rein beside the high brick wall surrounding Merlin House.