silently mixing
lime that sent up a hot steam upon the stagnant air. By their sides were
squares of dressed stone ranged neatly against the end of the vault, and
before them was a niche cut in the thickness of the wall itself, shaped
like a large coffin set upon its smaller end. In front of this niche was
placed a massive chair of chestnut wood. I noticed also that two other
such coffin-shaped niches had been cut in this same wall, and filled
in with similar blocks of whitish stone. On the face of each was a date
graved in deep letters. One had been sealed up some thirty years before,
and one hard upon a hundred.

These two men were the only occupants of the vault when we entered it,
but presently a sound of soft and solemn singing stole down the second
passage. Then the door was opened, the mason monks ceased labouring at
the heap of lime, and the sound of singing grew louder so that I could
catch the refrain. It was that of a Latin hymn for the dying. Next
through the open door came the choir, eight veiled nuns walking two
by two, and ranging themselves on either side of the vault they ceased
their singing. After them followed the doomed woman, guarded by two more
nuns, and last of all a priest bearing a crucifix. This man wore a black
robe, and his thin half-frenzied face was uncovered. All these and other
things I noticed and remembered, yet at the time it seemed to me that I
saw nothing except the figure of the victim. I knew her again, although
I had seen her but once in the moonlight. She was changed indeed, her
lovely face was fuller and the great tormented eyes shone like stars
against its waxen pallor, relieved by the carmine of her lips alone.
Still it was the same face that some eight months before I had seen
lifted in entreaty to her false lover. Now her tall shape was wrapped
about with grave clothes over which her black hair streamed, and in
her arms she bore a sleeping babe that from time to time she pressed
convulsively to her breast.

On the threshold of her tomb Isabella de Siguenza paused and looked
round wildly as though for help, scanning each of the silent watchers to
find a friend among them. Then her eye fell upon the niche and the heap
of smoking lime and the men who guarded it, and she shuddered and would
have fallen had not those who attended her led her to the chair and
placed her in it--a living corpse.

Now the dreadful rites began. The Dominican father stood before her and
recited her