Some one knocked at the door. To the reverend mother it sounded like the hand of fate that will not be denied. It seemed to her racked nerves that it must be Erceldonne himself who stood outside, ready to cry her shame aloud. It took all her strength to open the bolted door, and as it swung back the two nuns who waited there stood petrified. The reverend mother towered over them, clutching the door-handle and glaring at them with the eyes of a wild beast. At the sight of their startled faces she broke into a loud, hysterical laugh that nearly made Sister De Sales, the timid, turn and run. Holding the door-handle, the superior laughed and laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks. “I’m better--quite well!” she cried, that strange laughter ending as abruptly as it began. “But Sister De Sales is right. I’m not myself. Next week I will go to the retreat at the convent in Blackpool for a change.” The waters of terror were up to her very chin, but she would wade through them as she had always done, and get back to firm ground. CHAPTER XXXI. HOPELESS AND HELPLESS. “Oh, Salome, he’s--we’re too late!” Andria, a ghostly figure enough in her torn white dressing-gown, in which she had lain down to take the sleep which had betrayed her trust, and with smears of dried blood on her face, leaned backward where she knelt. “They’ve killed him.” “It ain’t de first,” answered Salome grimly, for all her panic of the slinking beasts that stood round their queer master. She dropped heavily down beside Heriot, and would have lifted the torn blanket that covered him, but a quiet word stopped her hand. “Wait!” cried the old man. “It is not good that they smell the blood.” He waved his open hand with a queer circular motion, and the great cats turned and seemed to pour into the narrow passage in a living stream of yellow-white fur. “I have told them to hunt for themselves,” he said slowly. “They will not come back till dawn.” “Praise de Lawd for dat!” grunted Salome devoutly. She could put all her mind on the dead man now, and she swept off the blanket that covered him only to recoil in her turn, for so blood-soaked were his clothes that she could not tell where he had been wounded. His face was colorless and quiet over the crimson clothes that had been white; the woman touched him, peered into his face, and cried out: “He ain’t dead, nor he ain’t dying,” she asserted. She undid his bloody shirt. “De ball must o’ glanced up on de bone. His ribs is broke from some reason--I dunno what, unless dey flung him down here!” She turned sharply to the old man who stood silently by. “Where you find him?” she asked in the bad Spanish that had been her mother tongue years ago.