“But nature is a mighty thing, my child, and after five years I became restless and unhappy.  I began to have misgivings about my vocation, but the Mother, who was wise and human, saw what was going on in my heart.  ‘You are thinking about your father,’ she said, ’that he is growing old, and needing a daughter to take care of him.  Go out, and nurse him, and then come back to your cell and pray.’

“I went, but when I reached my father’s house a great shock awaited me.  A strange man was in the porter’s lodge, and our beautiful palace was let out in apartments.  My father was dead—­three years dead and buried.  After my disappearance he had shut himself up in his shame and grief, for, little as I had suspected it and hard and cruel as I had thought him, he had really and truly loved me.  During his last days his mind had failed him and he had given away all his fortune—­scattered it, no one knew how, as something that was quite useless—­and then he died, alone and broken-hearted.”

That was the end of the Reverend Mother’s narrative.  She did not try to explain or justify or condemn her own or her sister’s conduct, neither did she attempt to apply the moral of her story to my own circumstances.  She left me to do that for myself.

I had been spell-bound while she spoke, creeping closer and closer to her until my head was on her breast.

For some time longer we sat like this in the soft Italian night, while the fire-flies came out in clouds among the unseen flowers of the garden and the dark air seemed to be alive with sparks of light.

When the time came to go to bed the Reverend Mother took me to my room, and after some cheerful words she left me.  But hardly had I lain down, shaken to the heart’s core by what I had heard, and telling myself that the obedience of a daughter to her father, whatever he might demand of her, was an everlasting and irreversible duty, imposed by no human law-giver, and that marriage was a necessity, which was forced upon most women by a mysterious and unyielding law of God, when the door opened and the Reverend Mother, with a lamp in her hand, came in again.

“Mary,” she said, “I forgot to tell you that I am leaving the Sacred Heart.  The Sisters of my old convent have asked me to go back as Superior.  I have obtained permission to do so and am going shortly, so that in any case we should have been parted soon.  It is the Convent of. . . .”

Here she gave me the name of a private society of cloistered nuns in the heart of Rome.

“I hope you will write to me as often as possible, and come to see me whenever you can. . . .  And if it should ever occur that . . . but no, I will not think of that.  Marriage is a sacred tie, too, and under proper conditions God blesses and hallows it.”

With that she left me in the darkness.  The church bell was ringing, the monks of the Passionist monastery were getting up for their midnight offices.