The stairs ended abruptly against a door.  Beatrice stood still.  She had received no further commands and the impulse ceased.

“Draw back the bolt and take me into the church,” said Unorna, who could see nothing, but who knew that the nuns fastened the door behind them when they returned into the convent.  Beatrice obeyed without hesitation and led her forward.

They came out between the high carved seats of the choir, behind the high altar.  The church was not quite as dark as the staircase and passages had been, and Unorna stood still for a moment.  In some of the chapels hanging lamps of silver were lighted, and their tiny flames spread a faint radiance upwards and sideways, though not downwards, sufficient to break the total obscurity to eyes accustomed for some minutes to no light at all.  The church stood, too, on a little eminence in the city, where the air without was less murky and impenetrable with the night mists, and though there was no moon the high upper windows of the nave were distinctly visible in the gloomy height like great lancet-shaped patches of gray upon a black ground.

In the dimness, all objects took vast and mysterious proportions.  A huge giant reared his height against one of the pillars, crowned with a high, pointed crown, stretching out one great shadowy hand into the gloom—­the tall pulpit was there, as Unorna knew, and the hand was the wooden crucifix standing out in its extended socket.  The black confessionals, too, took shape, like monster nuns, kneeling in their heavy hoods and veils, with heads inclined, behind the fluted pilasters, just within the circle of the feeble chapel lights.  Within the choir, the deep shadows seemed to fill the carved stalls with the black ghosts of long dead sisters, returned to their familiar seats out of the damp crypt below.  The great lectern in the midst of the half circle behind the high altar became a hideous skeleton, headless, its straight arms folded on its bony breast.  The back of the high altar itself was a great throne whereon sat in judgment a misty being of awful form, judging the dead women all through the lonely night.  The stillness was appalling.  Not a rat stirred.

Unorna shuddered, not at what she saw, but at what she felt.  She had reached the place, and the doing of the deed was at hand.  Beatrice stood beside her erect, asleep, motionless, her dark face just outlined in the surrounding dusk.

Unorna took her hand and led her forwards.  She could see now, and the moment had come.  She brought Beatrice before the high altar and made her stand in front of it.  Then she herself went back and groped for something in the dark.  It was the pair of small wooden steps upon which the priest mounts in order to open the golden door of the high tabernacle above the altar, when it is necessary to take therefrom the Sacred Host for the Benediction, or other consecrated wafers for the administration of the Communion.  To all Christians, of all denominations whatsoever, the bread-wafer when once consecrated is a holy thing.  To Catholics and Lutherans there is there, substantially, the Presence of God.  No imaginable act of sacrilege can be more unpardonable than the desecration of the tabernacle and the wilful defilement and destruction of the Sacred Host.