Marie Belloc Lowndes

Barbara Rebell Marie Belloc Lowndes

As Barbara Rebell, still Barbara Rebell, though she had been a wife, a most unhappywife, for six years, stepped from the small dark vestibule into the dimly-lighted hall ofChancton Priory, her foot slipped on the floor; and she would have fallen had not a man'shand, small but curiously bony and fleshless, grasped her right arm, while, at the samemoment, a deep voice from out the darkness exclaimed, "A good omen! So stumbled theConqueror!"The accent in which the odd words were uttered would have told a tale as to thespeaker's hard-bitten nationality to most English-speaking folk: not so to the woman towhom they were addressed. Yet they smote on her ear as though laden with welcome, forthey recalled the voice of a certain Andrew Johnstone, the Scotch Governor of the WestIndian island of Santa Maria, whose brotherly kindness and unobtrusive sympathy hadbeen more comfortable to her, in a moment of great humiliation and distress, than hisEnglish wife's more openly expressed concern and more eagerly offered friendship.