The sky overhead had deepened to purple, and opened starry eyes upon the world beneath.  Each time the silent woman, alone upon the battlements, lifted a sorrowful face to the heavens, yet another bright eye seemed to spring wide and gaze down upon her.

At length the whole expanse of the sky was studded with stars; the planets hung luminous; the moon, already waning, rose large and golden from behind the firs, growing smaller and more silvery as she mounted higher.

Mora covered her face with her hands.  The summer night was too full of scented sweetness.  The stars sang together.  The moon rode triumphant in the heavens.  In this her hour of darkness she must shut out the brilliant sky.  She let her face sink into her hands, and bowed her head upon her knees.

Blow after blow had fallen upon her from the Bishop’s letter.

First that the Bishop himself was plotting to deceive her, and seemed to take Hugh’s connivance for granted.

Then that she had been hoodwinked by old Mary Antony, on the evening of Hugh’s intrusion into the Nunnery; that this hoodwinking was known to the Bishop, and appeared but to cause him satisfaction, tempered by a faint amusement.

Then the overwhelming news that Mary Antony’s vision had been an imposition, devised and contrived by the almost uncannily shrewd wits of the old woman; and that the Bishop advised the Knight to praise heaven for those wits, and to beware lest any chance word of his should lead her—­Mora—­to doubt the genuineness of the vision, and to realise that she had been hocussed, hoodwinked, outwitted!  In fact the Bishop and her husband were to become, and to continue indefinitely, parties to old Antony’s deception.

She now understood the full significance of the half-humorous, half-sceptical attitude adopted by the Bishop, when she recounted to him the history of the vision.  No wonder he had called Mary Antony a “most wise and prudent babe.”

But even as her anger rose, not only against the Bishop, but against the old woman she had loved and trusted and who had so deceived her, she came upon the news of the death of the aged lay-sister and the account of her devoted fidelity, even to the end.

Mary Antony living, was often a pathetic figure; Mary Antony dead, disarmed anger.

And, after all, the old lay-sister and her spurious vision faded into insignificance in view of the one supreme question:  What course would Hugh take?  Would he keep silence and thus tacitly become a party to the deception; or would he, at all costs, tell her the truth?

It was evidence of the change her love had wrought in her, that this one point was so paramount, that until it was settled, she could not bring herself to contemplate other issues.

She remembered, with hopeful comfort, his scrupulous honesty in the matter of Father Gervaise.  Yet wherefore had he gone to consult with the Bishop unless he intended to fall in with the Bishop’s suggestions?