That evening, as Agnes was sitting in the garden at sunset, her grandmother bustling in and out, talking, groaning, and, hurrying in her preparations for the anticipated undertaking, suddenly there was a rustling in the branches overhead, and a bouquet of rose-buds fell at her feet.  Agnes picked it up, and saw a scrip of paper coiled among the flowers.  In a moment remembering the apparition of the cavalier in the church in the morning, she doubted not from whom it came.  So dreadful had been the effect of the scene at the confessional, that the thought of the near presence of her lover brought only terror.  She turned pale; her hands shook.  She shut her eyes, and prayed that she might not be left to read the paper; and then, summoning all her resolution, she threw the bouquet with force over the wall.  It dropped down, down, down the gloomy, shadowy abyss, and was lost in the damp caverns below.

The cavalier stood without the wall, waiting for some responsive signal in reply to his missive.  It had never occurred to him that Agnes would not even read it, and he stood confounded when he saw it thrown back with such apparent rudeness.  He remembered her pale, terrified look on seeing him in the morning.  It was not indifference or dislike, but mortal fear, that had been shown in that pale face.

“These wretches are practising on her,” he said, in wrath,—­“filling her head with frightful images, and torturing her sensitive conscience till she sees sin in the most natural and innocent feelings.”

He had learned from Father Antonio the intention of Agnes to go on a pilgrimage, and he longed to see and talk with her, that he might offer her his protection against dangers which he understood far better than she.  It had never even occurred to him that the door for all possible communication would be thus suddenly barred in his face.

“Very well,” he said to himself, with a darkening brow,—­“let them have it their own way here.  She must pass through my dominions before she can reach Rome, and I will find a place where I can be heard, without priest or grandmother to let or hinder.  She is mine, and I will care for her.”

But poor Agnes had the woman’s share of the misery to bear, in the fear and self-reproach and distress which every movement of this kind cost her.  The involuntary thrill at seeing her lover, at hearing from him, the conscious struggle which it cost her to throw back his gift, were all noted by her accusing conscience as so many sins.  The next day she sought again her confessor, and began an entrance on those darker and more chilly paths of penance, by which, according to the opinion of her times, the peculiarly elect of the Lord were supposed to be best trained.  Hitherto her religion had been the cheerful and natural expression of her tender and devout nature according to the more beautiful and engaging devotional forms of her Church.  During the year when her confessor