a whole plausible fabric. She knew
that, if necessary, she would deceive again, trailing her wings,
fluttering on before, as the golden plover lures the footsteps of the
stranger from her nest.

Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even
the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the
mental constitution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon
the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily
reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to
her Master and her Lord.

And she had always known, it seemed to her, that this terrible hour would
come. When the two young figures had moved away together into the green
gloom of the trees, she had felt a premonitory chill that streamed over
her whole body like icy water, paralysing and numbing her strength. She
had read their secret in their faces, unconscious of her scrutiny, and
watched them out of sight, praying, as only such a mother can, that it
might not be as she feared. This was her beloved's great hour; she would
not have stretched out a finger to delay its coming,--she who had known
Love, and could not forget! It might be that in this splendid boy, who was
as beautiful as the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard,
lay the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white would
not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe and veil. And yet--and
yet, in Lynette's place she knew that she could never have looked into the
face of a rosy, smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and
orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past.

Was it wise that another should be made to share that vision? She put that
question to herself, looking with great agonised, unseeing eyes over the
head that lay upon her bosom, out across the slowly moving water, stained
with amber from ironstone beds through which it had wound its way, tinged
with ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the sky, from the western horizon
to the zenith, and from thence to the serried peaks and frowning bastions
of purple-black cloud that lowered in the north, was all orange-crimson
now, and the moon, then at the ending of her second quarter, swung like a
pale lamp of electrum at the eastward corner of the flaming tent.

"Was it wise?" She seemed to hear her own voice echoing back out of the
past. And it said:

"The only just claim to your entire con