The fifteenth also hastened.

The sixteenth chanced to have taken the stairs more quickly and, appearing almost immediately, noticed no gap.

    Seventeen
    Eighteen
    Nineteen
    Twenty

Not one had turned her head in the direction of the pillar.  The procession was moving, with stately tread, along its accustomed way.

A delicious sense of security enveloped Hugh d’Argent.

The woman he loved was in his arms; she was his to shield, to guard, to hold for evermore.

    Twenty-one
    Twenty-two

She had come to him—­come to him of her own free will.  Holding her thus, he remembered those wondrous moments at the entrance to the crypt.  How hard it had been to loose her and leave her.  Yet how glad he now was that he had done so.

    Twenty-three
    Twenty-four

When all these white figures are gone, safely started on their mile-long walk, the door shut and locked behind them—­then he will fold back the cloak, turn her sweet face up to his, and lay his lips on hers.

    Twenty-five

Praise the holy saints!  The last!  But what an old ferret!

Yes; Mother Sub-Prioress gave the Knight a moment of alarm.  She peered to right and left.  Almost she saw the glint of the silver on the blue.  Almost, yet not quite.

Sniffing, she passed on, walking as if her feet were angry, each with the other for being before it.  She tweaked at her veil, as she turned and descended the steps.

Hugh glowed and thrilled from head to foot.

At last!

Almost——­

The sound of a closing door.

Slowly a key turned, grated in the lock, and was withdrawn.

Then—­silence.

But at sound of the turning key, the woman in his arms shivered, the slow, cold shudder of a soul in pain; and suddenly he knew that in coming to him she had chosen that which now seemed to her the harder part.

With the first revulsion of feeling occasioned by this knowledge, came a strong impulse to put her from him, to leap down the stairway, force open the heavy door, thrust her into the passage leading to her Nunnery, and shut the door upon her; then go out himself into the world to seek, in one wild search, every possible form of sin and revelry.

But this ungoverned impulse lasted but for the moment in which his passionate joy, recoiling upon himself, struck him a blinding, a bewildering blow.

In ten seconds he had recovered.  His arms tightened more securely around her.

She had come to him.  Whatever complex emotions might now be stirring within her, this fact was beyond question.  Also, she had come of her own free will.  The foot which had dared to stamp upon the torn fragments of the Pope’s mandate, had, with an equal courage, stepped aside from the way of convention and had brought her within the compass of his arms.