used and spoke.

"You hear what Miss Vane said?"

She made no answer.

"I do not know what you or your mother may have done. Some secret guilt
evidently weighed upon her soul. Whatever it may be, she confessed her
guilt and received forgiveness. Sabina Meldreth, in the presence of your
dead mother and of your living God, I call upon you to do the same. If
you would find mercy in the hour of your own death, confess your sin,
whatever it may be, and you shall be forgiven."

Still she stood silent and almost motionless, but her teeth gnawed at
her white lips as if to bite them through.

"You will have no better time than the present," said the Rector. "If
there is anything that you feel should be confessed, confess it now. It
is God's voice calling to you, not mine. Your mother cleared her
conscience before she died, do you the same. I bid you in God's name."

Maurice Evandale did not often speak after this fashion; he was no
fanatic, no bigot, but he believed intensely in the great eternal truths
which he preached, and in the presence of death--in the presence also,
as he believed, of mortal sin--he could not do less than appeal to what
was highest and best in the nature of the woman before him. What she had
to accuse herself of he could not possibly imagine; but he knew that
there was something. By the dead woman's incoherent words, by Sabina
Meldreth's violence, by Enid's stricken look of perplexity and pain, he
knew that something lay hidden which ought to be brought to light.

The winter's day was drawing to a close. Through the uncurtained window
the light stole dimly, and the reddened coals in the tiny grate threw
but a feeble gleam into the room. In every corner shadows seemed to
cluster, and the dead woman's face looked horribly pale and ghastly in
the surrounding gloom. The Rector waited with a feeling that the moment
was unutterably solemn; that it was fraught with the destiny of a
suffering, sinning human being--for aught he knew, with the destinies of
more than one. Suddenly the woman before him threw up her hands as if to
shut out the sight of her dead mother's face.

"I have nothing to tell you--nothing!" she cried. "What business have
you here? You teased my mother out of her last few minutes of life, and
now you want to get the mastery over me! It's my house now, my room--not
my mother's--and you may go out of it."

"Is that all you have to say," asked the Rector gravely--"even in her
presence, S