He pointed to an empty pane among the coloured pieces of the window through which, now and then, the wind blew powdery snow. She put her eyes to it and looked out upon a great bare moorland, white under a cold winter moon. Here and there sprang a fir tree, but for the most part the land stretched away to the horizon, empty as death—and as chill. So close to her eye that she must hold her head back in order to see it, rose a great square tower with stretches of tiled roof, mostly snow-covered, spreading out below it; this chapel was the end of the building, it was plain.
Now a strange, uncertain doubt fell over her, and forgetting the terrors of the dark cellar and the long vaults, she turned to the little door again.
"Open that," she said, "and I will try my luck at getting back. For I have come farther than I knew, it seems."
The friar crossed himself. "Back!" he cried, "back through those ancient tombs, Christ knows where? Never dream of it, my daughter! Besides," as she rushed to the door, "it would be impossible. The old key broke in the lock even as I laboured over it, and ten men could not stir it now."
"Tombs?" she murmured, fearfully, "what do you mean by tombs? I came through a cellar...."
"My daughter in Christ," said the friar, advancing firmly toward her and holding out with shaking hands an ivory crucifix so that it touched her breast, "if thou art a mad-woman only, God pity thee, but if thou art more—and worse—then know this sign, before Whom all devils tremble, and vanish! For thou art covered inches deep with the dust of tombs so old that they are forgotten utterly of us who tend the ashes of their descendants, and the cobweb that drapes thy body like a shawl so that I cannot tell for my life the fashion of thy garments, or if thou art young or old, maid or widow, has been a-thickening these hundred years and more!"
At this the moon struck sharply through the empty pane and she saw herself for what he had said and swooned with the cold and her deadly fear.
She came to herself in a soft whispering and rustling of skirts, and knew that women were moving around her.
"What will happen to her?" said one voice, "I had not thought such things possible, hadst thou, Alys?"
"I know that old Ursula who was here in the old Countess's day told of something like it, and that the old Countess ordered a bath made ready, such, she said, as her grandmother had ordered. It seems they are always prepared."