“Till when; how long am I to be so basely on my guard?” sobbed Paula.  “Is that love which trusts not and is not ready to share the lot even of the backslider?”

“Yes, child, yes,” interrupted the old woman.  “To suffer all things, to endure all things, is the duty of true love, and therefore of yours; but you must not allow the most indissoluble of all bonds to unite you to him till the back-slider has learnt to walk firmly.  Follow him step by step, hold him up with faithful care, never despair of him if he seems other than what you had hoped.  Make it your duty, pious soul, to render him worthy of grace—­but do not be in a hurry to speak the final yes—­do not say it yet.”

Paula yielded, though unwillingly, to this last word of counsel; but, in fact, Orion’s fault had filled the abbess with deep distrust.  So great a sinner, under the blight, too, of a father’s curse, ought, in her opinion, to have retired from the world and besieged Heaven for grace and a new birth, instead of seeking joys, such as she thought none but the most blameless—­and, those of her own confession—­could deserve, in union with so exceptional a creature as her beloved Paula.  Indeed, having herself found peace for her soul only in the cloister, after a stormy and worldly youth, she would gladly have received the noble daughter of her old friend as the Bride of Christ within those walls, to be, perhaps, her successor as Mother Superior.  She longed that her darling should be spared the sufferings she had known through the ruthlessness of faithless men; so she would not abate a jot of the tenor of her advice, or cease to impress on Paula, firmly though lovingly, the necessity of following it.  At last Paula took leave of her, bound by a promise not to pledge herself irrevocably to Orion till his return from Doomiat, and till the abbess had informed her by letter what opinion she had formed of him in the course of their flight.

The high-spirited girl had not shed so many tears, as in the course of this interview, since the fatal affair at Abyla where she had lost her father and brother; it was with a tear-stained face and aching head that she had made her way back, under the scorching mid-day sun, to Rufinus’ house, where she sought her old nurse.  Betta had earnestly entreated her to lie down, and when Paula refused to hear of it she persuaded her at any rate to bathe her head with water as cold as was procurable in this terrific heat, and to have her hair carefully rearranged by her skilful hand; for this had been her mother’s favorite remedy against headache.  When, at length, Paula and her lover stood face to face, in a shady spot in the garden, they both looked embarrassed and estranged.  He was pale, and gazed at her with some annoyance; and her red eyes and knit brows, for her brain was throbbing with piercing pain, did not tend to improve his mood.  It was her part to explain and excuse herself; and as he did not at once address her after they had exchanged greetings, she said in a low tone of urgent entreaty: