this. Here, let me past."

She pushed him unceremoniously aside at the head of the stairs and ran
past him. Long concealment of the deadly poverty within the walls had
taught her to close the gates behind her whenever she entered, but now
for greater security, or to gain time, she swung the great oaken beam
round on its pivot across the doors on the inside. Then turning round on
her heels she watched the bell that hung above her head. The Abbe,
who had followed her as quickly as he could, was naively looking for a
peep-hole between the timbers of the huge doors.

A minute later the bell swung slowly, and gave a single clang which
echoed beneath the vaulted roof, and in the hollow of the empty towers
on either side.

"Marie, Marie!" cried a gay girlish voice from without. "Open at once.
It is I."

"There," said Marie, in a whisper. "It is Mademoiselle, who has returned
from the good Sisters. And the story that you told of the fever at
Saintes is true."

CHAPTER XIII. WITHIN THE GATES

The great bell hanging inside the gates of Gemosac was silent for two
days after the return of Juliette de Gemosac from her fever-stricken
convent school, at Saintes.

But on the third day, soon after nightfall, it rang once more, breaking
suddenly in on the silence of the shadowy courts and gardens, bidding
the frogs in the tank be still with a soft, clear voice, only compassed
by the artificers who worked in days when silver was little accounted of
in the forging of a bell.

It was soon after eight o'clock, and darkness had not long covered the
land and sent the workers home. There was no moon. Indeed, the summons
to the gate, coming so soon after nightfall, seemed to suggest the
arrival of a traveller, who had not deemed it expedient to pass through
the winding streets of Gemosac by daylight.

The castle lies on a height, sufficiently removed from the little town
to temper the stir of its streets to a pleasant and unobtrusive evidence
of neighbourhood. Had the traveller come in a carriage, the sound of its
wheels would certainly have been heard; and nearer at hand, the tramp
of horses on the hollow of the old drawbridge, not raised these hundred
years, must have heralded the summons of the bell. But none of these
sounds had warned Juliette de Gemosac, who sat alone in the little white
room upstairs, nor Marie and her husband, dumb and worn by the day's
toil, who awaited bedtime on a stone seat by the stable door.

J