And as Laurence MacKim, crouched in the dim obscurity of the curtained doorway, looked forth, this is what he saw.

Maud Lindesay and Margaret Douglas advanced into the centre of the temple where was a slab of white marble let into the floor. As if by instinct the two maids stopped upon it, standing hand in hand before the iron altar and the vast shadowy image which gloomed above and appeared to reach forward in act to clutch them. After the first check in his hideous incantations, Gilles de Retz had returned to his own chamber, in which, after his entrance, the light gleamed brighter and more fiercely red than ever. As the maidens stood on the marble square La Meffraye went to the door and called certain words within, conveying some message which Laurence could not hear.

Then with an assured carriage and haughty stride came forth the marshal, his grey hair and blue-black beard in strong contrast with his haggard corpse-pale face, from which the momentary glow of youth half-restored had already faded, as fades a footprint upon wet sand.

Gilles de SillÉ and Poitou bowed silently before him as men who have done their commission, and who retire to await further orders. But La Meffraye, once more apparent, stood her ground.

"Here are the dainty maids from the far land; no beggars' brats are they. No strays and pickings from the streets. No, nor yet silly village innocents who follow La Meffraye from the play-fields through the woodlands to the Paradise of our Lord Gilles! Hasten not the joy! Let these pearls of youth and beauteousness die indeed, but let them die slowly and deliciously. And in the last blood of an ancient race let our master bathe and find the new life he seeks. Hear us, O Barran-Sathanas, and grant our prayer!"

Then La Meffraye approached the maids and would have touched the dress of the little Margaret, as if to order it more daintily for the pleasing of her master's eye. But Maud Lindesay thrust her aside like an unclean thing.

Whereat La Meffraye laughed till her rusty black cloak quivered and rustled from hood to hem.

"Ah, my proud lady," she croaked, "in a little, in a very little, you too will be calling upon La Meffraye to save you, to pity you. But I, La Meffraye, will gloat over each drop of blood that distils from your fair neck. Aha, you shall change your tone when at the white throat-apple which your sweetheart would have loved to kiss, you feel the bite of the sharp slow knife. Then you will not thrust aside La Meffraye. Then you shall cry and none shall pity. Then she will spurn you from her knees."

"Out!" said Gilles de Retz, briefly, and like some inferior imping devilkin before the great Master of Evil, La Meffraye retreated hobbling to the doorway of the marshal's chamber, where she crouched nodding and chuckling, mumbling inaudible words, and mingling them ever with her dry cackling laughter.

Gilles de Retz stopped at the corner of the platform and looked long at Maud and Margaret where they stood on the great central square of marble. It was the Maid who spoke first.

"Dear Messire," she said sweetly and almost confidently, "you have a little girl of your own. I know, for I have played with her. I love her. Therefore you will not hurt us. I am sure you will not hurt us. You are going to send us back in a ship to our own country, because it is lonely here where Maud and I know no one!"

The marshal smiled upon her his inhuman inscrutable smile. He leaned against a pillar of strangely twisted design, and contemplated the two victims at his ease.

"Life is sweet to you, is it not?" he said at last; "you are truly happy, being young, and so have no need to be made young again."

"Oh, but I am very old," cried the Maid, gaining some confidence from the quiet of his voice, "I am nearly eight years old. And our Maudie here, she is—oh, a dreadful age! She is very, very old!"

"You would not like to die?" suggested Gilles de Retz, with a certain soft insinuation.

"Oh, no," said Margaret Douglas, "I am going to live long and long—till every one in the world loves me. I am going to help every one to get what he most desires. And you know I can, for I shall be very rich. And if what they say is true, and I am Princess of Galloway, I shall marry and be a very great lady. But I shall never marry any one who is not a Douglas."

The marshal nodded.

"I do not think that you shall marry any one who is not a Douglas!" he said, with a certain grave and not discourteous irony in his tones.

"Yes," the little Maid went on. She had lost all fear in the very act of speech. "Yes, and Maud, she is going to marry Sholto—and they will be very happy, for they love each other so. I know it, for she told me to-night just before you sent for us to come to your feast. That was kind of you to remember us, though it was past bed-time. But now, good marshal, you will send us back, will you not? Now, look kind to-night. You will be glad afterwards that you were good to two maids who never harmed you, but are ready to love you if you prove kind to them."

"Hush, Margaret," said Maud Lindesay. "It is useless to speak such words to such a man."

The Marshal de Retz turned sharply to her.

"Ah," he said, with a curious bite in his speech, "then, my young lady, you would not love me, even if I were to let you go!"

"I should hate and abominate you for ever and ever, even if you helped me into Paradise!" quoth Maud Lindesay, giving him defiance in a full eye-volley.

"So," he said calmly, "I am indeed likely to help you into Paradise this very night. That is, unless Saint Peter of the Keys makes up his mind that so outspoken and tricksome a maid had best take a few thousand years of purgatory—as it were on her way upwards, en passant."

A sudden lowering passion at this point altered his countenance.

"No," he thundered, standing up erect from the pillar against which he had been leaning, and his whole voice and bearing changing past description, "it is enough—listen! I will be brief with you. I have brought both of you here that you may die. I cannot expect of you that you will understand or appreciate my motives, which are indeed above the knowledge of children. This is a temple to a Great God, and he demands the sacrifice of the noblest and most innocent blood. I do you the honour to believe that it is here to my hand. Also, your deaths will cause a number of people both in Scotland and elsewhere to sit easier in their seats. Lastly, I had sworn that you should die if your friends from Scotland came to trouble me. They have come, and Gilles de Retz keeps his word—as doth the Master whom he serveth!"

He bowed in the direction of the vast shadowy figure, which to Laurence's eye appeared to turn towards his niche with a leer, as if to say, "Listen to him. What a fool he is!"

The maids stood silent, not comprehending aught save that they were to die. Then suddenly Gilles de Retz cried out in his loudest military tones—"Henriet, Poitou, De SillÉ, bind these maidens upon the iron altar, that Barran-Sathanas may feed his eyes on their beauty and rejoice!"

And as they stood motionless upon the square of white marble, the servitors came forward and led them to the great altar of iron. They lifted the maidens up and laid their bodies crosswise upon the vast grid, the bars of which were as thick as a man's arm, arranging them so that their heads hung without support over the bar next the shadowy image.

As they bound them rudely hand and foot, the long and beautiful hair of Maud Lindesay escaped from its fastenings and fell down till it reached the bath of red porphyry which extended underneath the whole length of the altar of iron.

Then through all the Temple of Evil there ensued sudden silence. Not a sob or a moan escaped from the doomed maidens, and the feet of the assistants fell silent and soft as the paws of wild beasts upon the ebon floor.

Gilles de Retz waited till his acolytes had retired to their appointed places, where they stood like carven statues watching what should happen. Then slowly and deliberately he ascended to the broad platform from which the iron altar rose, and stood with his arms folded over his flame-coloured robe, looking gloatingly down, upon his innocent victims. Maud Lindesay was the nearer to him, and her unbound hair fell back and touched the peak of his pointed shoe of crimson Cordovan leather.

With a quick movement he caught up a handful of its rich luxuriance and allowed it to run through his fingers like sand again and yet again, with apparent delight in the sensation.

Even as he did so the dim figure of the horned demon above appeared to lean forward as if to touch him, and with a rushing noise the great hour-glass set upon a pedestal at the foot of the image turned itself completely over. Gilles with a startled air turned also, and seeing what it was he laughed a strange hollow laugh.

"It is indeed the hour, the hour of doom, fair maids," he said, looking down upon them as deferentially as if he had been paying his court in the great hall of Thrieve, "but it shall not pass without taking with it your souls to another, and I trust a higher, sphere!"

He paused, but no complaint or appeal reached his cruel and inexorable ear. The certain graciousness of Providence to those in extreme peril seemed to have blunted the edge of fear in the innocent victims. They lay still and apparently without consciousness upon the iron altar. The red glow played upon their faces, shining through from the inner chamber, and the figure of the marshal stood out black against it.

On the floor lay the goblet from which he had drunk the Red Milk.

"Give me the knife!" he cried, sudden as a trumpet that is blown.

And reaching a withered hand within the marshal's chamber as if to detach something from the wall, La Meffraye hobbled quickly across the altar platform, bearing in her hand a shining weapon of steel, broad of blade and curved at the point. She placed the ebony handle in the marshal's hand, who weighed it lovingly in his grasp.

Then for the first time since the men had bound her, the sweet childish eyes of little Margaret were unclosed and looked up at Gilles de Retz with the touching wonder of helplessness and innocence.

At that moment the image appeared to Laurence to beckon to him out of the gloom. A quick and nervous resolve ran through his veins. His muscles became like steel within his flesh. He rose to his feet, and, without pause for thought, rushed across the chapel from the niche where he had been hidden.

"Murderer! Fiend! I will kill you!" he cried, and with his dagger bare in his hand he would have thrown himself upon the marshal. But swifter than the rush of the young man in his strength there came another from the door of the inner chamber.

With a deep-throated roar of wholly bestial fury, Astarte the she-wolf sprang upon Laurence, and, though he sank his dagger twice to the hilt in her hairy chest, she over-bore him and they fell to the ground with her teeth gripping his shoulder. Laurence felt the hot life-blood of the beast spurt forth and mingle with his own. Then a flood of swirling waters seemed to bear him suddenly away into the unknown.

When Laurence MacKim came to himself he emerged into a chill world in which he felt somehow infinitely lonely and forsaken. Next he grew slowly conscious that his feet and arms were bound tightly with cords that cut painfully into the flesh. Then he realised that he, too, had taken his place beside the maids upon the altar of iron. Strangely enough he did not feel afraid nor even wish himself elsewhere. He only wondered what would happen next.

He opened his eyes and lo! they looked directly into the leering countenance of the monstrous image. Yet there seemed something curiously encouraging and even beneficent about the aspect of the demon. But so often as Gilles de Retz passed the triple array of his victims with his back to the image, the regard of the sculptured devil followed him, grim and mocking.

Words of angry altercation came to the ears of Laurence MacKim.

"I tell you," cried the voice of Gilles de Retz, "I will not spare them. Well nigh had I succeeded. Almost I was young again. I was tasting the first sweetness of knowledge wide as that of the gods. I felt the new life stirring within me. But I had not enough of the blood of innocence, which is the only worthy libation to Barran-Sathanas, who alone can bestow youth and life."

Then the Lady Sybilla answered him. "I pray you, Gilles de Retz, as you hope for mercy, slay not these maidens and this youth. Take me, and bind me, instead, for the sacrifice of death. I have wrought enough of evil! Take of my blood and work out your purpose. Let me give you the libation you desire. Gilles de Retz, if ever I have aided you, grant me this boon now. I beseech you, let these innocents go, and bind me upon the altar in their places."

Long and loud laughed Gilles de Retz, a hard, evil, and relentless laugh.

"Sybilla de Thouars an innocent maiden's sacrifice! Barran-Sathanas himself laughs at the jest. He would have no pleasure in your death. Soul and body you are his already. He desires only the blood and suffering of the innocent—of those on whom he has never set his mark. Nay, these three shall surely die, and in that bath of porphyry hollowed out under his altar I will lave me from head to foot in the Red Milk of innocence. I have no more need of you, Sybilla mine. You have done your work, and for your reward you can now depart to your own place. Out of my way, I say. Henriet, Poitou, quick! Remove this woman from before the altar!"

Then, struggling strongly in their hands, the servitors carried the Lady Sybilla to the farther end of the chapel, where they abode on either side, holding her fast. And as the last grains of sand began to swirl towards their fall and a little whirlpool to form funnel-wise in the midst of the hour-glass, the butcher was left alone with his victims upon the platform of the iron altar.

Gilles de Retz turned towards the image, and, lifting up his hand solemnly, he cried in a great voice, "O Barran-Sathanas, be pleased to behold this innocent blood spilled slowly in thine honour. As the red fount flows and the red fire burns, restore my youth and make me strong. Faithfully will I serve thee and thee alone, renouncing all other. O Barran-Sathanas, great and only Lord, receive my sacrifice. It is the hour!"

And so saying he laid hold of Maud Lindesay by the hair, and raised the curved knife on high.

Then from the end of the chapel to which the Lady Sybilla had been taken there came a sound. With a great despairing effort she burst from her captors' hands and ran forward. She knelt down on the marble slab whereon the maids had stood at their first entering, and as she knelt she held aloft a golden crucifix.

"If there be a God in heaven, let him manifest himself now!" she cried, "by the virtue of this cross of His son Jesus Christ, I call upon Him!"

Then suddenly all the place was filled with a mighty rushing noise. The last grains ran low in the hour-glass. It shifted in its stand and turned over. A tremor like that of an earthquake shook all the castle to its foundations. The solid keep itself rocked like a vessel in a stormy sea. The great image overturned, and by its fall Gilles de Retz was stricken senseless to the earth. The next moment, like flood-gates burst by a mighty tide, the doors of the temple were opened with a clang, and through them a crowd of armed men came rushing in with triumphant shouts and angry cries of vengeance.

Sholto was far ahead of the others, and, as if led by the unerring instinct of love, he ran to the altar whereon his love lay white as death, but without a mark upon her fair body.

It was the work of a moment to cut their cords and chafe the numbed wrists and ankles. James Douglas took the little Margaret. Sholto had his sweetheart in his arms, while Laurence recovered quickly enough to aid his father in securing Gilles de Retz and his servants. La Meffraye they took not, for she lay dead within the inner chamber, where yet burned the great fire which was used to consume the bodies of the demon's victims. Two gaping wounds were found in her breast, in the same place in which the dagger of Laurence MacKim had smitten the she-wolf as she sprang upon him. But Astarte, woman witch or were-wolf, was never seen again, neither by starlight, moonlight, nor yet in the eye of day. Truly of Gilles de Retz was it said, "His demon hath deserted him."

Beneath in the courts and quadrangles, swarming through the towers and clambering perilously on the roofs, surged the press of the furious populace. It was all that Duke John and his officers could do to keep the prisoners in ward, and to prevent them from being torn limb from limb (as had perhaps been fittest), and tossed alive into the flaming funeral pyre of Castle Machecoul, which, lighted by a hundred hands, presently began to flame like a volcano to the skies.

For the hour that comes to every evil-doer had come to Gilles de Retz. And in that hour, as it shall ever be, the devil in whom he trusted had forsaken him.

But the Lady Sybilla stood on the garden tower that in happier days had been her pleasaunce, and beheld. And as she watched she kissed the golden crucifix of the child Margaret. And her heart rejoiced because the lives of the innocent as well as the death of the guilty had been given her for her portion.

"And now, O Lord, I am ready to pay the price!" she said.