At that moment she understood, and putting her hands to her eyes she stumbled blindly toward the ruined church of the two Maries, heavily too, because she was encumbered by her holy garb.  When she was gone and the last rustle of her footsteps had died away upon the mid-summer silence, Mark buried his body in the golden flowers.

“How can I ever look any of them in the face again?” he cried aloud.  “Small wonder that yesterday I was so futile.  Small wonder indeed!  And of all women, to think that I should fall in love with Esther.  If I had fallen in love with her four years ago . . . but now when she is going to be professed . . . suddenly without any warning . . . without any warning . . . yet perhaps I did love her in those days . . . and was jealous. . . .”

And even while Mark poured forth his horror of himself he held her image to his heart.

“I thought she was a ghost because she was dead to me, not because she was dead to them.  She is not a ghost to them.  And is she to me?”

He leapt to his feet, listening.

“Should she come back,” he thought with beating heart.  “Should she come back . . .  I love her . . . she hasn’t taken her final vows . . . might she not love me?  No,” he shouted at the top of his voice.  “I will not do as my father did . . .  I will not . . .  I will not. . . .”

Mark felt sure of himself again:  he felt as he used to feel as a little boy when his mother entered on a shaft of light to console his childish terrors.  When he came to the ruined chapel and saw Esther standing with uplifted palms before the image of St. Mary Magdalene long since put back upon the pedestal from which it had been flung by the squire of Rushbrooke Grange, Mark was himself again.

“My dear,” Esther cried, impulsively taking his hand.  “You frightened me.  What was the matter?”

He did not answer for a moment or two, because he wanted her to hold his hand a little while longer, so much time was to come when she would never hold it.

“Whenever I dip my hand in cold water,” he said at last, “I shall think of you.  Why did you say that about the demons of the night?”

She dropped his hand in comprehension.

“You’re disgusted with me,” he murmured.  “I’m not surprised.”

“No, no, you mustn’t think of me like that.  I’m still a very human Esther, so human that the Reverend Mother has made me wait an extra year to be professed.  But, Mark dear, can’t you understand, you who know what I endured in this place, that I am sometimes tempted by memories of him, that I sometimes sin by regrets for giving him up, my dead lover so near to me in this place.  My dead love,” she sighed to herself, “to whose memory in my pride of piety I thought I should be utterly indifferent.”

A spasm of jealousy had shaken Mark while Esther was speaking, but by the time she had finished he had fought it down.

“I think I must have loved you all this time,” he told her.