“Call me Unorna, then.  It will remind us that you found me in February.”

CHAPTER XXV

After carefully locking and bolting the door of the sacristy Sister Paul turned to Beatrice.  She had set down her lamp upon the broad, polished shelf which ran all round the place, forming the top of a continuous series of cupboards, as in most sacristies, used for the vestments of the church.  At the back of these high presses rose half way to the spring of the vault.

The nun seemed a little nervous and her voice quavered oddly as she spoke.  If she had tried to take up her lamp her hand would have shaken.  In the moment of danger she had been brave and determined, but now that all was over her enfeebled strength felt the reaction from the strain.  She turned to Beatrice and met her flashing black eyes.  The young girl’s delicate nostrils quivered and her lips curled fiercely.

“You are angry, my dear child,” said Sister Paul.  “So am I, and it seems to me that our anger is just enough.  ‘Be angry and sin not.’  I think we can apply that to ourselves.”

“Who is that woman?” Beatrice asked.  She was certainly angry, as the nun had said, but she felt by no means sure that she could resist the temptation of sinning if it presented itself as the possibility of tearing Unorna to pieces.

“She was once with us,” the nun answered.  “I knew her when she was a mere girl—­and I loved her then, in spite of her strange ways.  But she has changed.  They call her a Witch—­and indeed I think it is the only name for her.”

“I do not believe in witches,” said Beatrice, a little scornfully.  “But whatever she is, she is bad.  I do not know what it was that she wanted me to do in the church, upon the altar there—­it was something horrible.  Thank God you came in time!  What could it have been, I wonder?”

Sister Paul shook her head sorrowfully, but said nothing.  She knew no more than Beatrice of Unorna’s intention, but she believed in the existence of a Black Art, full of sacrilegious practices, and credited Unorna vaguely with the worst designs which she could think of, though in her goodness she was not able to imagine anything much worse than the saying of a Pater Noster backwards in a consecrated place.  But she preferred to say nothing, lest she should judge Unorna unjustly.  After all, she did not know.  What she had seen had seemed bad enough and strange enough, but apart from the fact that Beatrice had been found upon the altar, where she certainly had no business to be, and that Unorna had acted like a guilty woman, there was little to lay hold of in the way of fact.

“My child,” she said at last, “until we know more of the truth, and have better advice than we can give each other, let us not speak of it to any one of the sisters.  In the morning I will tell all I have seen in confession, and then I shall get advice.  Perhaps you should do the same.  I know nothing of what happened before you left your room.  Perhaps you have something to reproach yourself with.  It is not for me to ask.  Think it over.”