our priests, with compressed
lips and anxious eyes.

"Well?" cried Percy.

"All right, gentlemen. But I'm thinking you'd better descend at Paris. I
know who you are, gentlemen--and though I'm not a Catholic---"

He stopped again.

"For God's sake, man---" began Percy.

"Oh! the news, gentlemen. Well, it was two hundred cars going to Rome.
There is a Catholic plot, sir, discovered in London---"

"Well?"

"To wipe out the Abbey. So they're going---"

"Ah!"

"Yes, sir--to wipe out Rome."

Then he was gone again.

CHAPTER VII

I

It was nearly sixteen o'clock on the same day, the last day of the year,
that Mabel went into the little church that stood in the street beneath
her house.

The dark was falling softly layer on layer; across the roofs to westward
burned the smouldering fire of the winter sunset, and the interior was
full of the dying light. She had slept a little in her chair that
afternoon, and had awakened with that strange cleansed sense of spirit
and mind that sometimes follows such sleep. She wondered later how she
could have slept at such a time, and above all, how it was that she had
perceived nothing of that cloud of fear and fury that even now was
falling over town and country alike. She remembered afterwards an
unusual busy-ness on the broad tracks beneath her as she had looked out
on them from her windows, and an unusual calling of horns and whistles;
but she thought nothing of it, and passed down an hour later for a
meditation in the church.

She had grown to love the quiet place, and came in often like this to
steady her thoughts and concentrate them on the significance that lay
beneath the surface of life--the huge principles upon which all lived,
and which so plainly were the true realities. Indeed, such devotion was
becoming almost recognised among certain classes of people. Addresses
were delivered now and then; little books were being published as guides
to the interior life, curiously resembling the old Catholic books on
mental prayer.

She went to-day to her usual seat, sat down, folded her hands, looked
for a minute or two upon the old stone sanctuary, the white image and
the darkening window. Then she closed her eyes and began to think,
according to the method she followed.

First she concentrated her attention on herself, detaching it from all
that was merely external and transitory, withdrawing it inwards ...
inwards, until she found that secret spark which, be