e farther end of the
chapel in a haze of brightness.

Below the altar, striking upwards from the floor of the sanctuary,
gleamed a corona of light. Charles--she could not for a moment doubt
that it was Charles's doing--had moved the six high, heavy silver
candlesticks which always stood on either side of the altar, and had
placed them on the ground.

There, in a circle, the wax candles blazed, standing sentinel-wise about
a dark, round object which was propped up on a pile of altar-linen
carefully arranged to support it.

Fear clutched at Catherine's heart--such fear as even in the early days
of Charles's madness had never clutched it. She was filled with a
horrible dread, and a wild, incredulous dismay.

What was the Thing, at once so familiar and so terribly strange, that
Charles had brought out of the November night and placed with so much
care below the altar?

But the thin flames of the candles, now shooting up, now guttering low,
blown on by some invisible current of strong air, gave no steady light.

Staying still close to the door, she sank down on her knees, and
desiring to shut out, obliterate, the awful sight confronting her, she
pressed both her hands to her eyes. But that availed her nothing.

Suddenly there rose up before Catherine Nagle a dreadful scene of that
great Revolution drama of which she had been so often told as a child.
She saw, with terrible distinctness, the severed heads of men and women
borne high on iron pikes, and one of these blood-streaked, livid faces
was that of James Mottram--the wide-open, sightless eyes, his eyes....

There also came back to her as she knelt there, shivering with cold and
anguish, the story of a French girl of noble birth who, having bought
her lover's head from the executioner, had walked with it in her arms
to the village near Paris where stood his deserted chateau.

Slowly she rose from her knees, and with her hands thrown out before
her, she groped her way to the wall and there crept along, as if a
precipice lay on her other side.

At last she came to the narrow oak door which gave on to the staircase
leading into the open air. The door was ajar; it was from there that
blew the current of air which caused those thin, fantastic flames to
flare and gutter in the awful stillness.

She drew the door to, and went on her way, so round to the altar. In the
now steadier light Catherine saw that the large missal lay open at the
Office for the Dead.

She l