After all, though, would the Almighty have allowed her to entertain such passions if He had not meant her to indulge them? Yet even the greatest saints had been tempted by the devil. Indeed, the greater the saint the greater the temptation. The problem was nice, and required careful weighing. In any other case she would readily have conceded that such a passion might have been inspired without the connivance of the Almighty; in her own she was so perfectly, though so humbly, convinced that she lived and spoke as the mouthpiece of Heaven itself that she could hardly conceive it possible but that any feeling she nourished must, of necessity, be just and holy, through the very fact that it was she, the Lady Gundred Darnley, who had engendered and developed it. However, a pious doubt now besieged her, and she dutifully cast about in her mind for means to solve this riddle that her scrupulous sense of right had set before her. Until this was decided, she felt that it would be unfair to proceed to extremities even against Ivor Restormel. But how to decide it? Prayer, Gundred felt, was the only obvious method. The Almighty must be asked to declare as to the sanctity of the crusade that she was meditating. Gundred, filled with the consciousness of holiness, would, nevertheless, go to Heaven to have that consciousness confirmed. In all ways she was clean and blameless, worthy of the celestial attention. She looked doubtfully for a moment at the little fair curls that lay on her dressing-table. But after all, they could not really be called a fraud on the Almighty, for were they not built up out of her own hoarded combings? And, for the rest, there was no other spot of deceit or frailty anywhere in her. So she knelt in confidence, and prayed. If her hatred for Ivor Restormel were wicked, would God give a sign by causing it to die immediately? On the other hand, if it continued to thrive in her heart, she would take its persistence as a sign that it was very pleasing in the sight of Heaven, and might be pursued to its ultimate extremities. She laboured the point once more, so that Heaven could not possibly fail to grasp it. If to-morrow she still hated Ivor Restormel, she would understand that her hatred was pious and profitable; if she should awake feeling filled with love and pity for him, then she must believe that her previous inspiration had been a temptation of the Evil One. Filled with a sense of imminent revelation, Gundred went to bed, and could hardly sleep for anxiety as to the morrow, and the sentiments that the morrow would show forth.