iting her approach.

"Yes, I," he said; "I."

Half-way across the hall, she paused.

"No," she said, as if to herself. "I dream. It is not Father
Gervaise. It is the Bishop."

She drew nearer.

Earnestly he looked upon her, striving to see in her the Prioress of
Whytstone--the friend of all these happy, peaceful, blessed years.

But the Prioress had vanished.

Mora de Norelle stood before him, taller by half a head than he,
flushed by long galloping in the night breeze; nerves strung to
breaking point; eyes bright with the great unrest of a headlong leap
into a new world. Yet the firm sweet lips were there, unchanged; and,
even as he marked them, they quivered and parted.

"Reverend Father," she said, "I have chosen, even as you prayed I might
do, the harder part." She flung aside the riding-whip she carried; and
folding her hands, held them up before him. "For Christ's sake, my
Lord Bishop, pray for me!"

He took those folded hands in his, gently parted them, and held them
against the cross upon his heart.

"You have chosen rightly, my child," he said; "we will pray that grace
and strength may be vouchsafed you, so that you may continue, without
faltering, along the pathway of this fresh vocation."

She looked at him with searching gaze. The kind and gentle eyes of the
Bishop met hers without wavering; also without any trace of the
fire--the keen brightness--which had startled her as she stood in the
doorway.

"Reverend Father," she said, and there was a strange note of bewildered
question in her voice: "I pray you, tell me what you bid penitents to
remember as they kneel in prayer before the crucifix?"

The Bishop looked full into those starry grey eyes bent upon him, and
his own did not falter. His mild voice took on a shade of sternness as
befitted the solemn subject of her question.

"I tell them, my daughter, to remember, the sacred Wounds that bled and
the Heart that broke for them."

She drew her hands from beneath his, and stepped back a pace.

"The Heart that broke?" she said. "That _broke_? Do hearts break?"
she cried. "Nay, rather, they turn to stone." She laughed wildly,
then caught her breath. The Knight had entered the hall.

With free, glad step, and head uplifted, Hugh d'Argent came to them,
where they stood.

"My Lord Bishop," he said, "you have been too good to us. I sent Mora
on alone that she might find you here, not telling her who was the
prelate who had so gra