the fire, shading her face with her hand and
watching that familiar face set in hard and undreamed lines of passion
and resolution and expectancy.

Once as footsteps came up the street he had started up and sat down
trembling.

She waited till the steps went past, and then spoke.

"Chris will be riding, father."

He nodded abruptly, and she saw by his manner that it was not Chris he
was expecting. She understood then that he still had hopes of his other
son, but they sat on into the night in the deep stillness, till the fire
burned low and red, and the stars she had seen at the horizon wheeled up
and out of sight above the window-frame.

Then he suddenly turned to her.

"You must go to bed, Mary," he said. "I will wait for Chris."

She lay long awake in the tiny cupboard-room that the labourer and his
wife had given up to her, hearing the horses stamp in the cold shed at
the back of the house, and the faces moved and turned like the colours
of a kaleidoscope. Now her father's eyes and mouth hung like a mask
before her, with that terrible look that had been on them as he faced
Ralph at the end; now Ralph's own face, defiant, icy, melting in turns;
now Margaret's with wide terrified eyes, as she had seen it in the
parlour that afternoon; now her own husband's. And the sweet autumn
woods and meadows lay before her as she had seen them during that silent
ride; the convent, the village, her own home with its square windows and
yew hedge--a hundred images.

* * * * *

There was a talking when she awoke for the last time and through the
crazy door glimmered a crack of grey dawn, and as she listened she knew
that Chris was come.

It was a strange meeting when she came out a few minutes later. There
was the monk, unshaven and pale under the eyes, with his thinned face
that gave no smile as she came in; her father desperately white and
resolved; Mr. Morris, spruce and grave as usual sitting with his hat
between his knees behind the others;--he rose deferentially as she came
in and remained standing.

Her father began abruptly as she appeared.

"He can do nothing," he said, "he can but turn her on to the road. And I
do not think he will dare."

"Ah! Beatrice Atherton?" questioned Mary, who had a clearer view of the
situation now.

"Yes--Beatrice Atherton. He fears that we shall tell her. He cannot send
Margaret to Overfield or Great Keynes now."

"And if he turns her out after al