Even now he remembered with how great a courage. There had been no half-measures in her atonement; no shielding of herself, or of that reputation that had been dearer than life. He had been as stunned as the nuns when, after a service for the dead for which she asked him, the Mother Superior had risen in her stall in the chapel and faced them all--every nun in the convent and himself. She was the color of ashes, even to her lips; and she swayed as she stood. She began very quietly; she asked their prayers, their patience. When her long story was done, each nun was on her knees. Was the reverent mother raving, that she should call herself a murderess, a hypocrite, a blasphemer? That she gave chapter and verse of her sins, her great humiliation? She stood in the silence that was full of hushed weeping, and beckoned to the convent chaplain, then led the way to the confessional. In agony she wrote a deposition, in agony she gave those directions that had saved Beryl Corselas, and fell on her knees. “You will excommunicate me!” she said. Father Maurice had raised his hands, and spoken. And as he finished a great cry rang out to the listening nuns. He had absolved her, as One Higher than he had forgiven the dying thief on the cross. But when he would have raised her from her knees, she was dead. He roused himself now, and looked for a long moment at Beryl Corselas. “Pray,” he said gently, “that you may make as good an ending.” Then he went away, to begin his watch by the dead. “Come,” said Heriot softly. “Let us go.” And, with Andria’s hand in hers, Beryl Corselas, who was Beryl Corselas no longer, left that house of crime. There is little more to tell. The madman who had paid his lifelong debt to Lord Erceldonne was never found. If he perished miserably on the wild moorlands, his misshapen bones were never discovered; if with the cunning of madness, he made his way back to the Azores, there was no one who suggested it to the police, though perhaps Andria Erle might have been able to, had she wished. Raimond Erle, rather than face bankruptcy and disinheritance, slipped away to Mexico; and there he died in a gambling-brawl. In his stead there reigned Beryl, Viscountess Erceldonne, whose husband was the Honorable Brian Heriot, next heir to the baronage of Heriot, for his brother never married. He was true to his word; he never touched a penny of her vast fortune. She spent it nearly all in helping the outcast and wretched. The sham Mrs. Fuller was a white slave no more. She lived at peace with the husband she loved--the man whom Lord Erceldonne had sworn to ruin, and thus had maintained an overmastering influence over her. Ebenezer Davids lighted lamps no more. He and his wife left the lodge at the great gate of Erceldonne, and he prided himself greatly that it was he who first discovered his present mistress was “the spit and image of his lordship.”