And thus Sir Terence O'Moy found sanctuary at the altar of his
country's need. They left him incredulously to marvel at the luck
which had so enlisted circumstances to save him where all had seemed
so surely lost an hour ago.

He sent a servant to fetch Mr. Butler, the prime cause of all this
pother - for all of it can be traced to Mr. Butler's invasion of the
Tavora nunnery - and with him went to bear the incredible tidings of
their joint absolution to the three who waited so anxiously in the
dining-room.




POSTSCRIPTUM


The particular story which I have set myself to relate, of how Sir
Terence O'Moy was taken in the snare of his own jealousy, may very
properly be concluded here. But the greater story in which it is
enshrined and with which it is interwoven, the story of that other
snare in which my Lord Viscount Wellington took the French, goes
on. This story is the history of the war in the Peninsula. There
you may pursue it to its very end and realise the iron will and
inflexibility of purpose which caused men ultimately to bestow upon
him who guided that campaign the singularly felicitous and fitting
sobriquet of the Iron Duke.

Ciudad Rodrigo's Spanish garrison capitulated on the 10th of July
of that year 1810, and a wave of indignation such as must have