since the priesthood in this instance could not
help, a girl's courage and love must take its place.

From the village above the hill came the stroke of a single bell; a
bird in the garden-walk beyond the paling chirped softly to his mate;
then once more silence came down upon the moonlit street, the striped
shadows, the tall house and trees, and the bearded face watching at
the window.

_Chapter XVII_

I

The little inner hall looked very quiet and familiar as Maggie
Deronnais stood on the landing, passing through her last struggle with
herself before the shock of battle. The stairs went straight down,
with the old carpet, up and down which she had gone a thousand times,
with every faint patch and line where it was a little worn at the
edges, visible in the lamplight from overhead; and she stared at
these, standing there silent in her white dress, bare-armed and
bare-necked, with her hair in great coils on her head, as upright as a
lance. Beneath lay the little hall, with the tiger-skin, the
red-papered walls, and a few miscellaneous things--an old cloak of
hers she used on rainy days in the garden, a straw hat of Laurie's,
and a cap or two, hanging on the pegs opposite. In front was the door
to the outer hall, to the left, that of the smoking-room. The house
was perfectly quiet. Dinner had been cleared away already through the
hatch into the kitchen passage, and the servants' quarters were on the
other side of the house. No sound of any kind came from the
smoking-room; not even the faint whiff of tobacco-smoke that had a way
of stealing out when Laurie was smoking really seriously within.

She did not know why, she had stopped there, half-way down the stairs.

She had dined from a tray in her own room, as she had said; and had
been there alone ever since, for the most part at her _prie-Dieu_, in
dead silence, conscious of nothing connected, listening to the
occasional tread of a maid in the hall beneath, passing to and from
the dining-room. There she had tried to face the ordeal that was
coming--the ordeal, at the nature of which even now she only half
guessed, and she had realized nothing, formed no plan, considered no
eventuality. Things were so wholly out of her experience that she had
no process whereby to deal with them. Just two words came over and
over again before her consciousness--Courage and Love.

She looked again at the door.

Laurie was there, she said. Then she questioned herself. Was