"Nine! Oh! that is late--I have never been out so late before--but it
can't matter--just this once--can it? And here in the north it is so
funny; it is light at nine, too! Perhaps it would be safest." Then,
peering down the vaulted passage and drawing back, "It is a gloomy hole
to get married in!"

"You won't say so when you see the chapel itself," he reassured her. "It
is rather a beautiful place. Whenever any of my ancestors committed a
particularly atrocious raid, and wanted to be absolved for their sins,
they put in a window or a painting or carving. The family was Catholic
until my grandfather's time, and then High Church, so the glories have
remained untouched."

Sabine kept close to him as they walked, as a child afraid of the dark
would have done. It seemed to her too like her recent experience of the
secret passage, and then she exclaimed in a voice of frank awe and
admiration, when he opened the nail-studded, iron-bound door at the end:

"Oh! how divine!"

And it was indeed. A gem of the finest period of early Gothic
architecture, adorned with all trophies which love, fear and contrition
could compel from the art of the ages. Glorious colored lights swept
down in shafts from matchless stained glass, and the high altar was a
blaze of richness, while beautiful paintings and tapestries covered the
walls.

It was gorgeous and sumptuous, and unlike anything else in England or
Scotland. It might have been the private chapel of a proud, voluptuous
Cardinal in Rome's great days.