gard her as unattainable. It had
ever been his firm belief that a man could win any woman upon whom he
wholly set his heart--always supposing that no other man had already
won her. And this woman had been his own betrothed, when treachery
intervened and sundered them. Yet that did not now count for much.

He had left a girl; he had come back to find a woman. That woman had
infinitely more to give; but it would be infinitely more difficult to
persuade her to give it.

At the close of their interview in her cell, the day before, all hope
had left him. But later, as they paced together in the darkness, hope
had revived.

The strange isolation in which they then found themselves--between
locked doors a mile apart, earth above, earth beneath, earth all around
them, they two alone, entombed yet vividly conscious of glowing
life--had brought her nearer to him; and when at last the moment of
parting arrived and again he faced it as final, there had come--all
unheralded--the sudden wonder of her surrender.

True, she had afterwards withdrawn herself; true, she had sent him from
her; true, he had gone, without a word. But that was because no
promise could have been so binding, as that silent embrace.

He had gone from her on the impulse of the sweetness of obeying
instantly her slightest wish; buoyed up by the certainty that no
Convent walls could long divide lips which had met and clung with such
a passion of mutual need.

That evening when, after much adventure, he at length gained the
streets of the city, he had trodden them with the mien of a victor.

That night he had slept as he had not slept since the hour when his
whole life had been embittered by a lying letter and a traitorous
tongue.

But morning, alas, had brought its doubts; noon, its dark
uncertainties; and as the hour of Vespers drew near, he had realised,
with the helpless misery of despair, that it was madness to expect the
Prioress of the White Ladies to break her vows, leave her Nunnery, and
fly with him to Warwick.

Yet he carried out his plan, and kept to his undertaking, though here,
in the calm atmosphere of the crypt, holy chanting descending from
above, the remembrance still with him of the aloofness of those stately
white figures gliding between the pillars in the distance, he faced the
madness of his hopes, and the mournful prospect of a life of loneliness.

Presently he arose, crossed the crypt, and took up his position behind
a pi