g heart. The dignity
of office developed her.

And wherefore?

Was it because, when her lips had bent above him in surrendering
tenderness, her husband had chosen to give her the sign of reverent
homage accorded to a prioress, rather than the embrace which would have
sealed her surrender?

Or was it because he had asked her to bless him as she had been wont to
bless the Poor at the Convent gate?

Or was it the unconscious action of his mind upon hers, he being
suddenly called to face some difficulty which had arisen, concerning
their marriage, or the Bishop's share in her departure from the Nunnery?

The clang of the closing gates sounded in her ears as a knell.

She shivered; then remembered how she had shivered at sound of the
turning of the key in the lock of the crypt-way door. How great the
change wrought by eight days of love and liberty. She had shuddered
then at being irrevocably shut out from the Cloister. She shuddered
now because the arrival of a messenger from the Bishop, and something
indefinable in Hugh's manner, had caused her to look back.

She stood quite still. None came to seek her. She seemed to have
turned to stone.

It was not the first time this looking back had had a petrifying effect
upon a woman. She remembered Lot's wife, going forward led by the
gentle pressure of an angel's hand, yet looking back the moment that
pressure was removed.

She had gone forward, led by the sweet angel of our Lady's gracious
message. Why should she look back? Rather would she act upon the
sacred precept: "Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are before"--this, said the apostle Saint
Paul, was the one thing to do. Undoubtedly now it was the one and only
thing for her to do; leaving all else which might have to be done, to
her husband and to the Bishop.

"This one thing I do," she said aloud; "this one thing I do." And
moving forward, in the strength of that resolve, she passed out into
the sunshine.

"_Do it now!_" sang the thrush, in the rowan-tree.

CHAPTER XLVII

THE BISHOP IS TAKEN UNAWARES

Symon of Worcester, seated before a table in the library, pondered a
letter which had reached him the evening before, brought by a messenger
from the Vatican.

It was a call to return to the land he loved best; the land of sunshine
and flowers, of soft speech and courteous ways; the land of heavenly
beauty and seraphic sounds; and, moreover