e two witnesses, after she had had
communion, that she was guiltless."

* * * * *

Robin was no story-teller; but for half an hour he was forced to become
one, until his hearers were satisfied. Even here, in the distant hills,
Mary's name was a key to a treasure-house of mysteries. It was through
this country, too, that she had passed again and again. It was at old
Chatsworth--the square house with the huge Italian and Dutch gardens,
that a Cavendish had bought thirty years ago from the Agards--that she
had passed part of her captivity; it was in Derby that she had halted
for a night last year; it was near Burton that she had slept two months
ago on her road to Fotheringay; and to hear now of her, from one who had
spoken to her that very autumn, was as a revelation. So Robin told it as
well as he could.

"And it may be," he said, "that I shall have to go again. Mr. Bourgoign
said that he would send to me if he could. But I have heard no word from
him." (He glanced round the watching faces.) "And I need not say that I
shall hear no word at all, if the tale I have told you leak out."

"Perhaps she hath a chaplain again," said Mr. John, after pause.

"I do not think so," said the priest. "If she had none at Chartley, she
would all the less have one at Fotheringay."

"And it may be you will be sent for again?" asked Marjorie's voice
gently from the darkness.

"It may be so," said the priest.

"The letter is to be sent here?" she asked.

"I told Mr. Bourgoign so."

"Does any other know you are here?"

"No, Mistress Marjorie."

There was a pause.

"It is growing late," said Mr. John. "Will your Reverence go upstairs
with me; and these ladies will come after, I think."

III

If it had been a great day for Robin that he should come back to his own
country after six years, and be received in this house of strange
memories; that he should sit upstairs as a priest, and hear confessions
in that very parlour where nearly seven years ago he had sat with
Marjorie as her accepted lover--if all this had been charged, to him,
with emotions and memories which, however he had outgrown them, yet
echoed somewhere wonderfully in his mind; it was no less a kind of
climax and consummation to the girl whose house this was, and who had
waited so long to receive back a lover who came now in so different a
guise.

But it must be made plain that to neither of them was there a thought or
a memory