hey were God knew, but they should be hers anyhow, and one
day she would know! For to fancy we go into the other world a set of
spiritual moles burrowing in the dark of a new and unknown existence,
is worthy only of such as have a lifeless Law to their sire. We shall
enter it as children with a history, as children going home to a long
line of living ancestors, to develop closest relations with them. She
would yet talk, live face to face, with those whose dust she was now
lifting in her two hands to restore it to its dust. Then they carried
the sheet to the altar, and thence swept into it every little particle,
back to its mother dust. That done, Donal knotted the sheet together,
and they began to look around them.

Desirous of discovering where the main entrance to the chapel had been,
Donal spied under the windows a second door, and opened it with
difficulty. It disclosed a passage below the stair, three steps lower
than the floor of the chapel, parallel with the wall, and turning, at
right angles under the gallery. Here he saw signs of an obliterated
door in the outer wall, but could examine no farther for the present.

In the meantime his companions had made another sort of discovery: near
the foot of the bed was a little table, on which were two drinking
vessels, apparently of pewter, and a mouldering pack of cards!
Card-playing and the hidden room did hold some relation with each
other! The cards and the devil were real!

Donal took up the sheet--a light burden, and Arctura led the way.
Arrived at her room, they went softly across to the door opening on
Donal's stair--not without fear of the earl, whom indeed they might
meet anywhere--and by that descending, reached the open air, and took
their way down the terraces and through the park to the place of burial.

It was a frosty night, with the waning sickle of a moon low in the
heaven, and many brilliant stars above it. Followed by faint ethereal
shadows, they passed over the grass, through the ghostly luminous
dusk--of funereal processions one of the strangest that ever sought a
tomb.

The ruin was in a hollow, surrounded by trees. Donal removed a number
of fallen stones and dug a grave. They lowered into it the knotted
sheet, threw in the earth again, heaped the stones above, and left the
dust with its dust. Then silent they went back, straight along the
green, moon-regarded rather than moon-lit grass: if any one had seen
them through the pale starry night,