I was accordingly transferred to the monastery, in spite of my own entreaties and those of the good Tartaglia, who moved heaven and earth to save his Columbine from sequestration.  You may imagine my despair.  My fear of doing Tartaglia an injury kept me from revealing my sex, and for twenty-four hours I languished in my cell, refusing food and air, and resisting the repeated attempts of the good monks to alleviate my distress.  At length however I bethought me that the Countess would soon appear; and it flashed across me that the one person who could protect me from her was her brother.  I at once sought an interview with the Abbot, who received me with great indulgence.  I explained to him that the distress I suffered was occasioned by the loss that my sequestration was causing my excellent manager, and begged him to use his influence to have me released from the monastery.  The Abbot listened attentively, and after a pause replied that there was but one person who could arrange the matter, and that was his sister the Countess Belverde, whose well-known piety gave her considerable influence in such matters.  I now saw that no alternative remained but to confess the truth; and with tears of agitation I avowed my sex, and threw myself on his mercy.

I was not disappointed in the result.  The Abbot listened with the greatest benevolence to all the details of my adventure.  He laughed heartily at his sister’s delusion, but said I had done right in not undeceiving her, as her dread of ridicule might have led to unpleasant reprisals.  He declared that for the present he could not on any account consent to let me out of his protection; but he promised if I submitted myself implicitly to his guidance, not only to preserve me from the Belverde’s machinations, but to ensure my reappearing on the stage within two days at the latest.  Knowing him to be a very powerful personage I thought it best to accept these conditions, which in any case it would have been difficult to resist; and the next day he informed me that the Holy Office had consented to the Signorina Miranda Malmocco’s appearing on the stage of Pianura during the remainder of the season, in consideration of the financial injury caused to the manager of the company by the edifying conversion of her twin-brother.

“In this way,” the Abbot was pleased to explain, “you will be quite safe from my sister, who is a woman of the most unexceptionable morals, and at the same time you will not expose our excellent Bishop to the charge of having been a party to a grave infraction of ecclesiastical discipline.—­My only condition,” he added with a truly paternal smile, “is that, after the Signorina Miranda’s performance at the theatre her twin-brother the Signor Mirandolino shall return every evening to the monastery:  a condition which seems necessary to the preservation of our secret, and which I trust you will not regard as too onerous, in view of the service I have been happy enough to render you.”