"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.

Then Michael answered with a cynical note in his voice:

"It is left for me--I, who am the last of them, to put up some expiatory
offering, I expect. Rapine and violence are in the blood," and then he
laughed lightly, and led her back through the gloom to his sitting-room.
There was a strange, fierce light in his bright blue eyes, which the
child-woman did not see, and which, if she had perceived, she would not
have understood any more than he understood it himself--for no concrete
thought had yet come to him about the future. Only, there underneath was
that mighty force, relentless, inexorable, of heredity, causing the
instinct which had dominated the Arranstouns for eleven hundred years.

He did not seek to detain his guest and promised bride--but, with great
courtesy, he showed her the way down the stairs of the lawn, and so
through the postern into the park, and he watched he