ned with the damp of years rising
from the pool. "But how shall we reach it? We must have come the wrong
way."

"Let's go back! Let's go back!" Esther exclaimed, surrendering to the
command of an intuition that overcame her pride. "This place is
unlucky."

Mark looking at her wild eyes, wilder in the dark that came so early in
this overshadowed place, was half inclined to turn round at her behest;
but at that moment he perceived a possible path through the nettles and
briers at the farther end of the pool and unwilling to go back to the
Rectory without having visited the ruined chapel of Wych Maries he
called on her to follow him. This she did fearfully at first; but
gradually regaining her composure she emerged on the other side as cool
and scornful as the Esther with whom he was familiar.

"What frightened you?" he asked, when they were standing on a grassgrown
road that wound through a rank pasturage browsed on by a solitary black
cow and turned the corner by a clump of cedars toward a large building,
the presence of which was felt rather than seen beyond the trees.

"I was bored by the brambles," Esther offered for explanation.

"This must be the driving road," Mark proclaimed. "I say, this chapel is
rather ripping, isn't it?"

But Esther had wandered away across the rank meadow, where her
meditative form made the solitary black cow look lonelier than ever.
Mark turned aside to examine the chapel. He had been warned by the
Rector to look at the images of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary
Magdalene that had survived the ruin of the holy place of which they
were tutelary and to which they had given their name. The history of the
chapel was difficult to trace. It was so small as to suggest that it was
a chantry; but there was no historical justification for linking its
fortunes with the Starlings who owned Rushbrooke Grange, and there was
no record of any lost hamlet here. That it was called Wych Maries might
show a connexion either with Wychford or with Wych-on-the-Wold; it lay
about midway between the two, and in days gone by there had been
controversy on this point between the two parishes. The question had
been settled by a squire of Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth
century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by
some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record
neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk
worshipped there, nor of those