"But you must remember that a girl has impulses and yearnings at times, and she should not be too harshly blamed if she sometimes fails to beat them down. But now it will all be different. The Blessed Virgin will help us, and our conflict is over." Betty and I started back to the coach, both feeling the uplift of our answered prayer. Probably we were the only devotees that had knelt before the shrine in hundreds of years, and the Virgin had heard our supplication. It was a proposition I should have laughed at and held to scorn prior to that time. After leaving the shrine, it was only a few minutes till the coach turned to the left into a narrow road, and we were approaching the end of our rough journey. We continued to travel at a brisk trot and came to the forest, "dark and wild," of which Lilly had spoken. Thus far his "calculations" were correct, and I was beginning to take hope that they would continue so to the end. After half an hour on the winding road through the forest, the drivers halted at the gate of which Lilly had spoken, and in ten minutes more drew rein beside the high brick wall surrounding Merlin House. Without the least trouble we found the gates or doors in the wall, and truly enough, they were of "thick oak" so strong that we could not feel them vibrate when we tried to shake them, and so firmly locked in the middle that we almost despaired of opening them. The wall was too high to scale, and for a moment it looked as though our journey had been in vain. But Betty's keen wits came to our rescue. When George and I had examined the gates and had almost despaired of opening them, Betty undertook an inspection of her own, and presently called our attention to a hole, perhaps four inches in diameter, in each gate, which was hidden by round curtains of wood hung within, so completely closing up the holes as to make them invisible save on close examination. She suggested that we pass the trace chain through one hole, draw it out through the other, hitch the horses to the two ends, and pull down the wall if the gates refused to give way. Her plan was so good that the horses soon opened the gate, though it required a strong pull from all four of them to do it. Betty and I were the first to enter, George following close at our heels. The two drivers, who had taken the horses back to the coach, hitched them to a tree and soon followed us, bringing the long leather reins to be used as climbing ropes if necessary. Hardly had we entered the gate till we saw a starlike gleam of light in a window of a room in the third story of the tower, as Lilly had predicted. While I was convinced that the light came through a hole in the curtain rather than from a star held by Raphael to guide us, still my scepticism was rapidly turning to awe.