She made for to rise, but with masterful hands he held her down.  His great strength must have some outlet, lest it should overmaster the gentleness of his love.  Also, perhaps, the primitive instincts of wild warrior forefathers arose, of a sudden, within him.

“I must carry thee,” he said.  “Not a step thither shalt thou walk.  Thine own feet brought thee to the crypt; others bore thee thence.  Thy palfrey carried thee home; thy palfrey bore thee here.  But to our chamber, my wife, I carry thee, alone.”

She would sooner have gone on her own feet; but her joy this day, was to give him all he wished, and as he wished it.

As he bent above her, she slipped her arms around his neck.  “Then carry me, dear Heart,” she said, “but do not let me fall.”

He laughed; and as he swung her out of the seat, and strode across the great hall to where the western glow still gleamed from the doorway of his mother’s chamber, she knew of a sudden, why he had wished to carry her.  His great strength gave him such easy mastery; helped her to feel so wholly his.

On the threshold of the chamber he paused.

Bending his face to hers, he touched her lips with exceeding gentleness.  Then spoke in her ear, deep and low.  “Say again what thou didst say ten nights ago when we parted in the dawning, on the battlements.”

“I love thee,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.

Then Hugh passed within.

CHAPTER LX

THE CONVENT BELL

The slanting rays of the setting sun lay, in golden bands, upon the flags of the Convent cloister.

Complete silence reigned.

The White Ladies had returned from Vespers.  Each, in the solitude of her own cell, was spending, in prayer and meditation, the hour until the Refectory bell should ring.

The great door into the cloisters stood wide.

Mother Sub-Prioress appeared in the far distance, moving down the passage.  As she passed between the long line of closed doors, she turned her face quickly from side to side, pausing occasionally to listen, ear laid against the panelling.

Presently she stepped from the cool shadow into the sunny brightness of the cloister.

She did not blink, as old Mary Antony used to blink.  Her small eyes peered from out her veil as sharply in sunshine as in shadow.

Yet was there something curiously furtive about Mother Sub-Prioress, when she entered the cloister.  Listening at the doors in the cell passage, she had been merely official, acting with a precise celerity which bespoke long practice.  Now she hesitated; looked around as if to make sure she was not observed, and obviously held, with her left hand, something concealed.

Moving along the cloister, she seated herself upon the stone slab in the archway overlooking the lawn and the pieman’s tree; then drew forth from beneath her scapulary, the worn leathern wallet which had belonged to the old lay-sister, Mary Antony.