"You do not mean that?"
"I do not."
She saw again the mutilated beings in the catacombs, aye, even her own home flaming to the sky, and the white face of her dead father. Faith and devotion were great in her for the moment. Divine vengeance beaconed over the world, a torch borne aloft by the hand of Pity.
"It is God's war," she said to him with a finer solemnity sounding in her voice; "you have stirred the woman in me. Is that enough?"
"Enough," he answered her.
"And the rest?"
"God shall make all plain in due season."
Gilderoy had dwindled into the east; its castle's towers still netted the moonlight from afar. The meadowlands had ceased, and trees strode down in multitudes to guard the track. The night was still and calm, with a whisper of frost in the crisp, sparkling air. The world seemed roofed with a dome of dusky steel.
Before them a shallow valley lay white in the light of the moon. Around climbed the glimmering turrets of the trees, rank on rank, solemn and tumultuous. The bare gable ends of a ruined chapel rose in the valley. Fulviac drew aside by a bridle path that ran amid rushes. To the left, from the broken wall of the curtilage, a great beech wood ascended, its boughs black against the sky, its floor ankle-deep with fallen leaves. The chapel stood roofless under the moon. Hollies, a sable barrier that glistened in the moonlight, closed the ruin on the south. Yews cast their gloom about the walls. A tall cross in the forsaken graveyard stretched out its mossy arms east and west.
The armed groom took the horses and tethered them under a clump of pines by the wall. Fulviac and the girl Yeoland passed up through weeds and brambles to the porch. A great briar rose had tangled the opening with a thorny web, as though to hold the ruin from the hand of man. The tiled floor was choked with grass; a rickety door drooped rotten on its rusty hinges.