'Pope and all?' Wantley smiled. For the first time he allowed his eyes frankly to meet hers. 'Yes, yes!' she cried with something of her old eagerness; 'he always knew and recognized goodness when he saw it. And, Ludovic, you know what I told you to-day--of my awful loneliness, of my desolation of body and spirit?' Wantley looked at her uneasily. 'Even as I spoke to you,' she said, 'my punishment was being remitted, my solitude blessedly invaded--for he, the husband of my youth, my companion and helper, was returning, to help me across the passage.' A feeling, not so much of astonishment, as of awe and fear came over Wantley. His eyes sought the dim grey shadows, out of which he half expected to see force itself the figure of the man he had never wholly liked, or even wholly respected, but whom he had always greatly feared. 'He came back with Cecily,' Lady Wantley added, after a long pause. 'Her purity has blotted out my iniquity.' 'And do you actually see him now? Are you aware of his presence?' Wantley in a sense felt that on her answer would depend what he himself would see, and as he waited he felt increasingly afraid; but, 'To know that he is there is all I ask,' she said slowly; 'to be able to tell him everything is the sum of my desire, and this I can now do;' and, lying back on her high pillows, she sank into silence and sleep. CHAPTER XIX 'On childing women that are forlorn, And men that sweat in nothing but scorn-- That is, on all that ever were born-- Miserere, Domine.' H. B. I The next morning poor Cecily felt strangely forlorn. Somehow, this did not seem like Christmas Day. Wantley, haggard, but smiling, after his long night's vigil, had declared that the state of the roads made it out of the question that they should drive the six miles to the nearest Catholic church, and she had submitted without a word, only insisting that he should have some hours of sleep. And then, after having knelt down by the fire in the spacious room which had been prepared for her, when she had read the service of the Mass and said her rosary, she sent a message to Lady Wantley asking if she could come to her. The mistress of Marston Lydiate was still in bed, and in the wintry morning light Cecily saw with a pang how aged and how ailing her old friend had become, but the look of intolerable distress and terror had gone from the pale, delicate face. 'Do you know, my dear, what day this is--I mean, what day this is to me?' 'Yes,' said Cecily, smiling: 'I know that it is Penelope's birthday, as well as Christmas Day.'