So the household of St. Gabriel's waited for Neville and his guard to enter the room, a deep silence hanging over all. Giles Brent, from his end of the long table, sat gazing at his sister, and thinking how strangely her smooth, round face and domestic bearing contrasted with the grim scene around her. It was as if some brown thrush had been caught up from its nest in the bushes by the wind of destiny, and suddenly enveloped in the black cloud of a tornado. Mary Brent kept her eyes steadily fixed upon the portrait of Lord Baltimore, painted by Van Dyck, and hanging on the wall on the turn of the stairs. She studied every detail of his costume,--the small clothes of blue velvet, coat embroidered in gold, and doublet embroidered in silver, the open sleeves with their azure lining, the breastplate of blue inlaid with gold, and the sword-hilt studded with jewels, the powdered wig that topped the whole, and the cocked hat, its flap looped and held back with brilliants, which shone bright as real gems. These seemed real while the figures around her receded from her sight dim and blurred, wavering like figures in a dream. There was Mistress Calvert on the settle below the bend of the stairs. Was she really Elinor Calvert, or a corpse like the one which lay scarcely more white in the middle of the room? Elinor herself was almost as doubtful as her cousin whether she really lived and breathed. It seemed rather as though she had already tasted the bitterness of death, and now moved about, a pale, miserable ghost in a land where all was ghastly and miserable. Even Cecil seemed unreal, and that worried her more than all the rest. In the last three days the touch of those little arms had in some way lost its power to comfort, and the childish presence had grown irksome because it forbade her giving way to the bursts of wild weeping which had alternated with stony despair. Just now Cecil was pressing close to her side and whispering in her ear,-- "Mamma, did Thir Chrithtopher Neville kill the priest? Dost thou think he did it?" "Hush, Cecil!" "But did he?" "I know not." "Father White thinks he did it." Silence on Elinor's part. "And Couthin Giles thinks so." Still silence. "And Couthin Mary thinks so; but I do not." "And why?" "Because he promised me a bow and arrowth and he knew thou wouldst not let me take a gift from a murderer." The quick stab of the word was intolerable. Elinor thrust the child away from her side with a swift, tragic gesture; then, at sight of the angry flush in his cheeks and the grieved wonder in his eyes, she caught him to her heart again close, and bowed her head over his curls.