ing as I've repented what I done years back,
and I've come to make an honest girl of her at last?"

The whirling waters of bitterness in her breast were rising, drowning
her.... He realised her momentary weakness, and moved a step or two
nearer, keeping well between the woman and the door.

"What's to hinder me, I say?"

Her rapier of keen womanly intuition flashed out at him again, and drew
the blood.

"Your fear will hinder you. You are here in an assumed character, and
under a false name." The long arm shot out, the white hand pointed at him
again. "You never came here from Diamond Town. That letter was a forgery.
You have papers on you now that would prove you to be a spy, if you were
taken. Ah, I can see it written in your coward's face!"

The devil was at the woman's ear, prompting her. Or was it----? Bough's
dark, full-blooded face bleached to muddy-pale as her terrible voice rang
through the desolate place, and echoed among the broken rafters.

"You boast yourself ready to admit your infamy. You shall be compelled!
Everything shall be made known! I will go to Lord Beauvayse now, and tell
him all--all! And if he loves her, he will marry her. And you who have
secrets upon your soul even more perilous, if less vile and
hideous"--again the terrible hand pointed, and that sense of a
supernatural force that it wielded knocked his knees together and dried up
his mouth--"I see the millstone round your neck!..."

The clarion voice mounted on a great note of triumph. With her inspired
face, and with her floating veil, she looked like a Prophetess of old.
"The Lord is not mocked! He will avenge His little one as He has promised!
Move aside, you lost, and branded, and miserable wretch! Do you dare to
dream you can hinder Me from doing what I have said?"

He was at the bottom of the altar-steps as the tall, imperious figure came
sweeping down. The curtain of rain no longer fell between them, but behind
him. He must silence that railing voice that cried in the house-top--put
out the light of those intolerable eyes....

He drew out his revolver with a blasphemous oath. At the gleam of steel in
the thickening twilight she dropped her upraised arms, and made a swift
rush to the rope of the bell, and set it clanging. Two double strokes rang
out; the third was broken in the middle.... For as she swung round,
panting and tugging at the rope, he shot her in the back above the line of
the white wimple from which the veil str