about her neck, and
kissed her, saying: "Do not be sorry any more. Confess to the minister
of God. I also have sinned and been sorry. Yet after came forgiveness
and the unbound heart."

Then the Lady Sybilla ceased quickly and looked up, as it had been,
smiling. Yet she was not smiling as maidens are wont to smile.

"Pretty innocent," she said, "you mean well, but you know not what the
word 'sin' means to such as I. Confess--absolve! Not even the Holy One
and the Just could give me that. I tell you I have eaten of the apple
of the knowledge of good and evil--yes, the very core I have eaten. I
have the taste of innocent blood upon my lips. I have seen the axe
fall, the axe which I put into the headsman's hands. I am condemned,
and that justly. But one of you shall live to taste sweet love, and
the crown of life, and to feel the innocent lips of children at her
breasts. And the other--but enough. Farewell. Fear not. God, who has
been cruel in all else, has given your lives to Sybilla de Thouars,
ere in His own time He strike that guilty one with His thunderbolt."

And as she went within, the eyes of the maids followed her; but the
masked man with the naked sword never so much as turned his head,
gazing straight forward over the battlements of the White Tower into
the lilac mist which hung above the Atlantic.

CHAPTER LIII

SYBILLA'S VENGEANCE

There stands a solitary rock at the base of which is a cave, on the
seashore of La Vendee. Behind stretch the marshes, and the place is
shut in and desolate. Birds cry there. The bittern booms in the
thickets of grey willow and wet-shot alder. The herons nest upon the
pine trees near by, till the stale scent of them comes down the wind
from far. Ospreys fish in the waters of the shallow lake behind, and
the scales of their prey flash in the sun of morning as they rise
dripping from the dive.

In this place Sholto, Malise, and the Lord James Douglas were
presently abiding.

It was but a tiny cell, originally formed by two portions of marly
rock fallen together in some ancient convulsion or dropped upon each
other from a floating iceberg. In some former age the cleft had been a
lair of wild beasts, or the couch of some hairy savage hammering flint
arrowheads for the chase, and drawing with a sharp point upon polished
bone the yet hairier mammoth he hunted. But this solitary lodging in
the wilderness had been enlarged in more recent times, till now the
interior was a