She did not achieve her sentence. Sabina Meldreth had flown like a tigress at her mother's throat.

But, fortunately for Mrs. Meldreth, a strong and resolute man was in the room. He had already drawn nearer to Sabina, with a feeling that she was not altogether to be trusted, and, as soon as she made her first savage movement--so like that of a wild beast leaping on its prey--his hands were upon her, his strong arms holding her back. For a minute there was a frightful struggle. The Rector pinioned her arms; but she, with the ferocity of an undisciplined nature, flung her head sideways and fastened her teeth in his arm. Her strength and her agility were so great that the Rector could not easily disengage himself; and, although the cloth of his coat-sleeve prevented her attempt to bite from doing any great injury, the assault was sufficiently painful and sufficiently unexpected to protract the struggle longer than might have been anticipated. For, as she was a woman, Maurice Evandale did not like to resort to active violence, and it was with some difficulty that he at last mastered her and placed her in a chair, where for a few minutes he had to hold her until her struggles ceased and were succeeded by a burst of convulsive sobs. Then he felt that he might relax his hold, she ceased to be dangerous when she began to cry.

Enid had involuntarily withdrawn her arm from Mrs. Meldreth's shoulders, and sprung to her feet with a low cry when she saw the struggle that was taking place; but in a second or two she conquered her impulse to fly to the Rector's aid, and with rare self-control bent once more over the dying woman, who needed her help more than Mr. Evandale could. Poor Mrs.

Meldreth was almost unconscious of the disturbance. Her eyes were glazing, her sight was growing feeble, the words that fell from her lips were broken and disconnected. But still she spoke--still she went on pouring her story into Enid's listening ears.

When the Rector at last looked round, he saw an expression on Enid's face which chilled him to the bone. It was a look of unutterable woe, of grief, shame, agony, and profound astonishment. But there was no incredulity. Whatever Mrs. Meldreth had told her Enid had believed. The Rector made one step towards the bed.

"If you have anything to confess, Mrs. Meldreth," he began; but Enid interrupted him.

"She has confessed," said the girl, turning her face to him with a strange look of mingled humiliation and compassion--"she has confessed--and I--I have forgiven. Nurse, do you hear? God will forgive you, and I forgive you too."

"God will forgive," murmured the woman.

A smile flickered over her pale face. Then a change came; the light in her eyes went out, her jaw fell. A slight convulsion passed through her whole frame, and she lay still--very still. The confession, great or small, that she had made had been heard only by Enid and her God.

CHAPTER XVII.

"It is all over," said Maurice Evandale, looking gravely at the dead woman's face. "It is all over, and may God have mercy upon her soul!"

He left Sabina, who was sobbing hysterically as she sat huddled up in the chair on which he had placed her, and came to Enid's side. She turned to him with sorrowful appeal.

"Is she dead? Can nothing be done?"

"Nothing. Come away, Miss Vane; this is no place for you. One moment!

Have you anything to say to this woman? Have you any charge to bring?"

He pointed to Sabina as he spoke, and she, roused for an instant, raised a mute terrified face from her hands, and seemed to shrink still lower in her chair, as if she would willingly have hidden herself and her secret, whatever it might be, out of sight of all the world. She waited--waited--evidently with dread--for the accusation that she expected from Enid's lips. The Rector waited also, but the accusation did not come. There was a moment's utter silence in the chamber of death.

"Have you anything to say?" asked Maurice Evandale at last.

Then Enid spoke.

"No," she answered, with quivering lips; "I can say nothing. I--I forgave her--before she died;" and then she turned away and went swiftly out of the room, leaving the others to follow or linger as they pleased.

Sabina rose from her chair and stood as if dazed, stupefied by her position. All her fierceness and defiance had left her; her face was white, her eyes were downcast, her hands hung listlessly at her sides.

The Rector paused and spoke.

"You hear what Miss Vane said?"

She made no answer.

"I do not know what you or your mother may have done. Some secret guilt evidently weighed upon her soul. Whatever it may be, she confessed her guilt and received forgiveness. Sabina Meldreth, in the presence of your dead mother and of your living God, I call upon you to do the same. If you would find mercy in the hour of your own death, confess your sin, whatever it may be, and you shall be forgiven."

Still she stood silent and almost motionless, but her teeth gnawed at her white lips as if to bite them through.

"You will have no better time than the present," said the Rector. "If there is anything that you feel should be confessed, confess it now. It is God's voice calling to you, not mine. Your mother cleared her conscience before she died, do you the same. I bid you in God's name."

Maurice Evandale did not often speak after this fashion; he was no fanatic, no bigot, but he believed intensely in the great eternal truths which he preached, and in the presence of death--in the presence also, as he believed, of mortal sin--he could not do less than appeal to what was highest and best in the nature of the woman before him. What she had to accuse herself of he could not possibly imagine; but he knew that there was something. By the dead woman's incoherent words, by Sabina Meldreth's violence, by Enid's stricken look of perplexity and pain, he knew that something lay hidden which ought to be brought to light.

The winter's day was drawing to a close. Through the uncurtained window the light stole dimly, and the reddened coals in the tiny grate threw but a feeble gleam into the room. In every corner shadows seemed to cluster, and the dead woman's face looked horribly pale and ghastly in the surrounding gloom. The Rector waited with a feeling that the moment was unutterably solemn; that it was fraught with the destiny of a suffering, sinning human being--for aught he knew, with the destinies of more than one. Suddenly the woman before him threw up her hands as if to shut out the sight of her dead mother's face.

"I have nothing to tell you--nothing!" she cried. "What business have you here? You teased my mother out of her last few minutes of life, and now you want to get the mastery over me! It's my house now, my room--not my mother's--and you may go out of it."

"Is that all you have to say," asked the Rector gravely--"even in her presence, Sabina Meldreth?"

"Yes, that's all," she answered, the old fierceness creeping back into her tones. "What else should I have to say? I suppose you can have me taken up for assault; Miss Vane will bear witness in your favor fast enough, no doubt. I don't care!"

"Do you not care even when you think what I kept you back from?" said Mr. Evandale. "Your mother was old, weak, dying, and you threw yourself upon her with violence. You will remember that some day, and will bless me perhaps because I withheld your hand. Your attack upon me matters nothing. I am willing to believe that you did not know what you were doing. I will leave you know--it is not seemly that we should discuss this matter any further. But, if ever you want help or counsel--and the day may come, my poor woman, when you may want both--then come to me."

He opened the door, went out, and closed it behind him, leaving Sabina Meldreth alone with the dead.

He found two or three women down-stairs already; Enid Vane must have told Polly, as she passed through the shop, that Mrs. Meldreth's end had come. As soon as he had gone, two of them went up-stairs to perform the necessary offices in the chamber of death. They found Sabina stretched on the floor in a swoon, from which it was long before she recovered.

"You wouldn't ha' thought she had so much feeling in her," said one of the women to the other, as they ministered to her wants.

Meanwhile the Rector strode down the village street, straining his eyes in the twilight, and glancing eagerly from side to side, in his endeavor to discover what had become of Miss Vane. He knew that she had probably never been out so late unattended in her life before; lonely as her existence seemed to be, she was well cared for, anxiously guarded, and surrounded by every possible protection. He had been surprised to find her in Mrs. Meldreth's cottage so late in the afternoon. Only the exigencies of the situation had prevented him from following her at once when she left the house--only the stern conviction that he must not, for the sake of Miss Vane's bodily safety and comfort, neglect Sabina Meldreth's soul. But, when he felt that his duty in the cottage was over, he sallied forth in search of Enid Vane. She had been wearing a long fur-lined cloak, he remembered, and on her head a little fur toque to match. The colors of both were dark; at a distance she could not be easily distinguished by her dress. And she had at least three-quarters of a mile to walk--through the village, down-hill by the lane, past the fir plantation where her father had been found murdered, and a little way along the high-road--before she would reach her own park gate. The Rector, like all strong men, was very tender and pitiful to the weak.

The thought of her feeling nervous and frightened in the darkness of the lane was terrible to him; he felt as if she ought to be guarded and guided throughout life by the fearless and the strong.

He walked down the street--it was a long straggling street such as often forms the main thoroughfare of a country village--but he saw nothing of Enid. At the end of the street were some better-built houses, with gardens; then came the Rectory and the church. He paused instinctively at the churchyard gate. Surely he saw something moving amongst the tombs over there by the railed-in plot of ground that marked the vault, in which lay the mortal remains of Sydney and Marion Vane? Had she gone there? Was it Enid's slender form that crouched beside the railings in the attitude of helpless sorrow and despair?

The Rector did not lose a moment in finding out. He threw open the gate, dashed down the pathway, and was scarcely astonished to discover that his fancy was correct. It was Enid Vane who had found her way to her parents' grave, and had slipped down upon the frosted grass, half kneeling, half lying against the iron rails.

One glance, and Evandale's heart gave a leap of terror. Had she fainted, or was she dead? It was no warm, conscious, breathing woman whom he had found--it was a rigid image of death, as stiff, as sightless, as inanimate as the corpse that he had left behind. He bent down over her, felt her pulse, and examined the pupils of her eyes. He had had some medical training before he came to Beechfield, and his knowledge of physiological details told him that this was no common faint--that the girl was suffering from some strange cataleptic or nervous seizure, for which ordinary remedies would be of no avail.

The Rectory garden opened into the churchyard. Maurice Evandale had not a moment's hesitation in deciding what to do. He lifted the strangely rigid, strangely heavy figure in his arms, and made his way along the shadowy churchyard pathway to the garden gate. The great black yews looked grim and ghostly as he left them behind and strode into his own domain, where the flowers were all dead, and the leafless branches of the fruit-trees waved their spectral arms above him as he passed. There was something indefinably unhomelike and weird in the aspect of the most familiar places in the winter twilight. But Maurice Evandale, by an effort of his strong will, banished the fancies that came into his mind, and fixed his thoughts entirely upon the girl he was carrying. How best to restore her, what to do for her comfort and her welfare when she awoke--these were the thoughts that engrossed his attention now.

He did not go to the front-door. He went to a long window which opened upon the garden, and walked straight into his own study. A bright fire burned in the grate; a lamp was placed on the table, where books and papers were heaped in true bachelor confusion. A low broad sofa occupied one side of the room; the Rector deposited his burden upon it, and then devoted himself seriously to the consideration of the case before him.

Enid lay white, motionless, rigid, where he had placed her; her eyelids were not quite closed, and the eyes were visible between the lids; her lips were open, but the teeth were tightly closed; a slight froth showed itself about her mouth.

"It is no faint," the Rector said to himself. "It is a fit, a nervous seizure of some sort. If she does not revive in a minute or two, I shall send for Ingledew"--Ingledew was the village doctor--"and in the meantime I'll act on my own responsibility."

Certain reviving measures were tried by him, and apparently with success. The bluish whiteness of the girl's face changed to a more natural color, her teeth relaxed, her eyelids drooped. Evandale drew a quick breath of relief when he saw the change. He was able to pour a few drops of brandy down her throat, to chafe the unresisting hands, to bathe the cold forehead with some hope of affording relief. He did all as carefully and tenderly as if he had been a woman, and he did not seem to wish for any other aid. Indeed he had locked the door when he first came in, as if to guard against the chance of interruption.

Presently he heard her sigh; then tears appeared on her lashes and stole down her cheeks. Her limbs fell into their natural position, and she put up her hand at last with a feeble, uncertain movement, as if to wipe away her tears. Evandale drew back a little--almost out of her sight. He did not want to startle her.

"Where am I?" she said, in a tremulous voice.

"You are at the Rectory, Miss Vane," said Maurice Evandale quietly. "You need not be at all alarmed; you may have heard that I am something of a doctor, and, as I found that you did not seem well, I took the liberty of bringing you here."

"I don't remember," she said softly, opening her blue eyes and looking at him--without shyness, as he noticed, but with a kind of wistful trust which appealed to all the tenderness of his nature. "Did I faint?"

There was a slight emphasis on the last word.