They chose the former alternative, the heavy rain having given place to a hailstorm by this time, and, before they had climbed in the shelter of vineyard-walls and steep rock-ledges to the first ridge, the hail gave over and the storm-beaten, indigo sea spread darkly, dashed with white foam-ridges, to their sight, when they stopped to take breath and shake out their skirts, whitened by hail. Some fresh mimosa boughs in a jar of rough country pottery adorned one of the faded shrines of the Seven Sorrows. Who had placed it there, and in memory of what anguish? Agatha wondered, and Ermengarde told her of the phantom nuns Heinrich the porter had seen haunting the shrines at night. "He must have believed that he saw them," she argued, "because nuns are improbable. If he had invented them, they would have had to be monks, since this was a male community--and still is--for the brothers come back occasionally now. How the people must miss them! They used to serve that church across the ravine. And look--this is how they got to their church." She pointed to a long straight flight of narrow steps, hewn by hand-labour out of one steep and solid rock, making a long and giddy descent of slippery and uncertain footing where the narrow steep stairs were mossed and uneven; so steep and so long the flight was that the greater part of it was hidden from sight below. Agatha looked with unseeing eyes, her heart too full of her grief to be interested in anything unconnected with it. She remembered well her first acquaintance with those pathetic shrines, deserted but still finding some humble hearts to honour them in their evil hour. She remembered her anguish and prayer--prayer she knew now ungranted--on the convent steps, in the very face of the consolation offered upon the cross planted there as if in welcome. All the earth had seemed full of silent prayer in the hush and glory of sunset, on that first evening; every hill and ridge had been an altar smoking with sacrificial incense, and the amphitheatre of mountains standing round the broad sweep of the bay a vast temple of adoration, in the centre of which the cross on the top of the steps spread out its welcoming, protecting arms. She remembered, too, the sight that had afterwards met her gaze from the convent wall; and even now, as she walked wearily past the shrines, fancied the rank odours of musk and cigars tainting the purity of the sweet, still air. Even while she had been wrestling in prayer for him on that evening, Ivor had passed, laughing and fooling with that evil woman who had been his destruction.