ard it."

"Call me Unorna, then. It will remind us that you found me in February."

CHAPTER XXV

After carefully locking and bolting the door of the sacristy Sister Paul
turned to Beatrice. She had set down her lamp upon the broad, polished
shelf which ran all round the place, forming the top of a continuous
series of cupboards, as in most sacristies, used for the vestments
of the church. At the back of these high presses rose half way to the
spring of the vault.

The nun seemed a little nervous and her voice quavered oddly as she
spoke. If she had tried to take up her lamp her hand would have shaken.
In the moment of danger she had been brave and determined, but now that
all was over her enfeebled strength felt the reaction from the strain.
She turned to Beatrice and met her flashing black eyes. The young girl's
delicate nostrils quivered and her lips curled fiercely.

"You are angry, my dear child," said Sister Paul. "So am I, and it seems
to me that our anger is just enough. 'Be angry and sin not.' I think we
can apply that to ourselves."

"Who is that woman?" Beatrice asked. She was certainly angry, as the
nun had said, but she felt by no means sure that she could resist the
temptation of sinning if it presented itself as the possibility of
tearing Unorna to pieces.

"She was once with us," the nun answered. "I knew her when she was a
mere girl--and I loved her then, in spite of her strange ways. But she
has changed. They call her a Witch--and indeed I think it is the only
name for her."

"I do not believe in witches," said Beatrice, a little scornfully. "But
whatever she is, she is bad. I do not know what it was that she wanted
me to do in the church, upon the altar there--it was something horrible.
Thank God you came in time! What could it have been, I wonder?"

Sister Paul shook her head sorrowfully, but said nothing. She knew
no more than Beatrice of Unorna's intention, but she believed in the
existence of a Black Art, full of sacrilegious practices, and credited
Unorna vaguely with the worst designs which she could think of, though
in her goodness she was not able to imagine anything much worse than
the saying of a _Pater Noster_ backwards in a consecrated place. But she
preferred to say nothing, lest she should judge Unorna unjustly. After
all, she did not know. What she had seen had seemed bad enough and
strange enough, but apart from the fact that Beatrice had been found
upon the altar, where