before he left the convent, a request which was graciously accepted, as a compliment to the Reverend Mother. He was paraded along wide and airy passages, was shown an empty refectory, where plates and mugs and huge piles of bread and butter were arranged on long deal tables, covered with snow-white linen, in readiness for the afternoon goûter. He saw the chapel with its humble decorations, its somewhat crude copy of a well-known Guido, its altar, rich in gilded paper, home-made lace, and cheap china vases. All here spoke of small means; but the flowers on the altar were freshly gathered, and the neatness and cleanliness of all things in chapel and convent charmed the stranger's eye. He slipped a couple of sovereigns into the box by the door, praised the airy corridors, the spacious whitewashed rooms, and left the principal and the lay-sister alike charmed with his good French and his friendly manners.
The clock of the monastery on the opposite hill was striking five as he drove away from the convent, a silvery chime that could be heard all over Dinan.
He dined at the table d'hôte at the Hôtel de la Poste, and walked on the terrace on the town walls after dinner. There is no fairer view in Brittany than the panorama of wooded hills from that walk above the town walls. The cool night air, the silvery moonlight, soothed Edward Heathcote's nerves. He was able to meditate upon his afternoon's work, to think over the story he had heard from Sister Gudule, and to speculate upon the chances of his being able to follow up this thread of a life-history until it led him to some point which would throw a light upon the mystery of Léonie Lemarque's death.
Reflecting upon Sister Gudule's story, he could but conclude that the child Léonie had been the witness of some scene of violence in which a woman had been the victim—a murder possibly, or it might be only an attempted murder. Blood had been spilt. Hence that awful cry, "Take away the blood, take away the dark forest!"—a child's appeal to some unknown power to remove an object of terror.
One and one only clue had he obtained from Sister Gudule as to the person of the victim, and even that indication might be a false light leading him astray.
The girl's painful emotion at the utterance of her aunt's name suggested that the victim had been that aunt. The mere mention of the name would conjure up all the horror of that scene which had so nearly wrecked the child's reason.
It therefore seemed plain to Heathcote's mind that a murder, or an attempt at murder, had been committed in a dark wood, and that the victim had been Léonie Lemarque's aunt. So deeply interested was he in this mystery of ten years back, so powerfully moved by this strange story of a child's suffering, that he almost forgot that the business which had brought him
