"Ah! I have tried to forget," said Isabel. "I do not want to think of him as he was when he was angry and disappointed. At last he flung out of the room and down the stairs, and I have not seen him since. But Lady Maxwell sent for me the same evening an hour later; and told me that she could not live there any longer. She said that Hubert had ridden off to London; and would not be down again till Whitsuntide; but that she must be gone before then. So I am afraid that he said things he ought not; but of course she did not tell me one word. And she asked me to go with her. And, and--Anthony, I did not know what to say; because I did not know what you would do when you heard that I was a Catholic; I was waiting to tell you when you came home--but now--but now----Oh, Anthony, my darling!" At last the two came indoors. Mistress Margaret met them in the hall. She looked for a moment at the two; at Anthony in his satin and lace and his smiling face over his ruff and his steady brown eyes; and Isabel on his arm, with her clear pale face and bosom and black high-piled hair, and her velvet and lace, and a rope of pearls. "Why," said the old nun, smiling, "you look a pair of lovers." Then presently the three went together up to the Hall. * * * * An hour or two passed away; the Paschal moon was rising high over the tall yew hedge behind the Italian garden; and the Hall lay beneath it with silver roofs and vane; and black shadows under the eaves and in the angles. The tall oriel window of the Hall looking on to the terrace shone out with candlelight; and the armorial coats of the Maxwells and the families they had married with glimmered in the upper panes. From the cloister wing there shone out above the curtains lines of light in Lady Maxwell's suite of rooms, and the little oak parlour beneath, as well as from one or two other rooms; but the rest of the house, with the exception of the great hall and the servants' quarters, was all dark. It was as if the interior life had shifted westwards, leaving the remainder desolate. The gardens to the south were silent, for the night breeze had dropped; and the faint ripple of the fountain within the cloister-court was the only sound that broke the stillness. And once or twice the sleepy chirp of a bird nestling by his mate in the deep shrubberies showed that the life of the spring was beating out of sight. And then at last the door in the west angle of the terrace, between the cloister wing and the front of the house, opened, and a flood of mellow light poured out on to the flat pavement. A group stood within the little oaken red-tiled lobby; Lady Maxwell and her sister, slender and dignified in their dark evening dresses and ruffs; Anthony holding his cap, and Isabel with a lace shawl over her head, and at the back the white hair and ruddy face of old Mr. Barnes in his cassock at the bottom of the stairs.