“Admirably,” he assured her, with what solemnity he could.

Sabine seemed thoroughly satisfied with herself.

“That’s all right, then.  Now I must be off, or they will be coming to look for me, and that would be a bore.”

“But we have not made all the arrangements for our wedding.”  The prospective bridegroom thought it prudent to remind her.  “When can you come on Thursday?  My train gets in about six.”

“Thursday,” and she contracted her dark eyebrows.  “Let me see—­Yes, we are staying until Saturday to see the remains of Elbank Monastery—­but I don’t know how I can slip away, unless—­only it would be so late.  I could say I had a headache and go to bed early without dinner, and get here about eight while they were having theirs.  It is still quite light—­I often had to pretend things at the Convent to get a moment’s peace.”

Michael reflected.

“Better not chance eight—­as you say it is quite light then and they might see you.  Slip out of the hotel at nine.  The park gate is, as you know, right across the road.  I will wait for you inside, and we can walk here in a few minutes—­and come up these balcony steps—­and the chapel is down that passage—­through this door.  See.”

He went and opened the door, and she followed him—­talking as she walked.

“Nine!  Oh! that is late—­I have never been out so late before—­but it can’t matter—­just this once—­can it?  And here in the north it is so funny; it is light at nine, too!  Perhaps it would be safest.”  Then, peering down the vaulted passage and drawing back, “It is a gloomy hole to get married in!”

“You won’t say so when you see the chapel itself,” he reassured her.  “It is rather a beautiful place.  Whenever any of my ancestors committed a particularly atrocious raid, and wanted to be absolved for their sins, they put in a window or a painting or carving.  The family was Catholic until my grandfather’s time, and then High Church, so the glories have remained untouched.”

Sabine kept close to him as they walked, as a child afraid of the dark would have done.  It seemed to her too like her recent experience of the secret passage, and then she exclaimed in a voice of frank awe and admiration, when he opened the nail-studded, iron-bound door at the end: 

“Oh! how divine!”

And it was indeed.  A gem of the finest period of early Gothic architecture, adorned with all trophies which love, fear and contrition could compel from the art of the ages.  Glorious colored lights swept down in shafts from matchless stained glass, and the high altar was a blaze of richness, while beautiful paintings and tapestries covered the walls.

It was gorgeous and sumptuous, and unlike anything else in England or Scotland.  It might have been the private chapel of a proud, voluptuous Cardinal in Rome’s great days.

“Why is that one little window plain?” Sabine asked.