n angel must be helping me, and whispering what to do.
Perhaps it was so.

"Will you be so good as to take a message to the black servant who came
with me?" I said.

"Certainly, Madam."

"Then please to tell him that I wish to speak with him at the door of
this room."

"Madam, forgive me, but I dare not bring any one here."

I tore a blank leaf out of a book on the table. I had a pencil in my
pocket. "Give him this, then; and let no one take it from you. You
shall have a guinea to do it."

"Gemini!" I heard the girl whisper to herself in amazement.

I wrote hastily:--"Beg my Uncle Charles to come this moment, and bring
Dobson. Tell him, if he ever loved either me or Miss Hester, he will do
this. It is a matter of life and death."

"Promise me," I said, unlocking the door to give it to her, "that this
piece of paper shall be in my black servant's hands directly, and that
no one else shall see it."

I spoke to a young girl, apparently one of the lower servants of the
house. Her round eyes opened wide.

"Please do it, Betty!" sobbed poor Hatty. "Do it, for pity's sake!"

"I'll do it for yours, Miss Hester," said the girl, and her kindly,
honest-looking face reassured me. She hid the paper in her bosom, and
ran down. I locked the door again, and went back to Hatty.

"O Cary, dear, God sent you!" she sobbed. "I thought I must give in."

"What are they trying to make you do, Hatty?"

To my amazement, she replied,--"To be a nun."

"To be what?" I shrieked. "Are these people Papists, then?"

"Not to acknowledge it. I had not an idea when we came--nor the
Bracewells, I am sure."

"And did they want all three of you to be nuns?"

"No--only me, I believe. I heard Father Godfrey saying to the Mother
that neither Charlotte nor Amelia would answer the purpose: but what the
purpose was, I don't know."

"Who are you talking about? Who is Father Godfrey?--Mr Crossland?"

"Yes. He is a Jesuit priest."

"You mean his mother, then, by `_the_ Mother'?"

"Oh, she is not his mother. I don't think they are related."

"What is she?"

"The Abbess of a convent of English nuns at Bruges."

"And is that poor little girl, Miss Annabella, one of the conspirators?"

"She is the decoy. I think her wits have been terrified out of her; she
only does as she is told."

"Hatty," I said, "you do not believe the doctrines of Popery?"

"I don't know what I believe, or don't believe," she sobbed. "If you