from the world of free thought and action which had been her native element, overwhelmed every other feeling, and she lay numb in the clutch of fate.  But she was too young for this merciful torpor to last, and with the returning consciousness of her situation came the instinctive effort to amend it.  How she longed then to have been buried in some strict order, where she might have spent her days in solitary work and meditation!  How she loathed the petty gossip of the nuns, their furtive reaching after forbidden pleasures!  The blindest bigotry would have been less insufferable than this clandestine commerce with the world, the strictest sequestration than this open parody of the monastic calling.  She sought in vain among her companions for an answering mind.  Many, like herself, were in open rebellion against their lot; but for reasons so different that the feeling was an added estrangement.  At last the longing to escape over-mastered every other sensation.  It became a fixed idea, a devouring passion.  She did not trust herself to think of what must follow, but centred every faculty on the effort of evasion.

At this point in her story her growing distress had made it hard for Odo to gather more than a general hint of her meaning.  It was clear, however, that she had found her sole hope of escape lay in gaining the friendship of one of the more favoured nuns.  Her own position in the community was of the humblest, for she had neither rank nor wealth to commend her; but her skill on the harpsichord had attracted the notice of the music-mistress and she had been enrolled in the convent orchestra before her novitiate was over.  This had brought her into contact with a few of the more favoured sisters, and among them she had recognised in Sister Mary of the Crucifix the daughter of the nobleman who had been her aunt’s landlord at Treviso.  Fulvia’s name was not unknown to the handsome nun, and the coincidence was enough to draw them together in a community where such trivial affinities must replace the ties of nature.  Fulvia soon learned that Mary of the Crucifix was the spoiled darling of the convent.  Her beauty and spirit, as much perhaps as her family connections, had given her this predominance; and no scruples interfered with her use of it.  Finding herself, as she declared, on the wrong side of the grate, she determined to gather in all the pleasures she could reach through it; and her reach was certainly prodigious.  Here Odo had been obliged to fall back on his knowledge of Venetian customs to conjecture the incidents leading up to the scene of the previous night.  He divined that Fulvia, maddened by having had to pronounce the irrevocable vows, had resolved to fly at all hazards; that Sister Mary, unconscious of her designs, had proposed to take her on a party of pleasure, and that the rash girl, blind to every risk but that of delay, had seized on this desperate means of escape.  What must have followed had she not chanced on Odo, she had clearly neither the courage nor the experience to picture; but she seemed to have had some confused idea of throwing herself on the mercy of the foreign nobleman she believed she was to meet.