uld be determined by the manifestations of contrition which she might
evince, and which would be proved by the frequency of her
self-flagellations, the severity with which the scourge was applied, and
the anxiety which she might express to become a member of the holy
sisterhood. When the term of penitence should arrive, the maiden would
be removed to the department of the convent inhabited by the professed
nuns; and then her flowing hair would be cut short, and she would enter
on her novitiate previously to taking the veil, that last, last step in
the conventual regime, which would forever raise up an insuperable
barrier between herself and the great, the beautiful, the glorious world
without!

Such was the picture spread for the contemplation of this charming, but
hapless maiden.

Need we wonder if her glances recoiled from her prospects, as if from
some loathsome specter, or from a hideous serpent preparing to dart from
its coils and twine its slimy folds around her?

Nor was the place in which she was a prisoner calculated to dissipate
her gloomy reflections.

It seemed a vast cavern hollowed out of the bowels of the earth,
rendered solid by masonry and divided into various compartments. No
windows were there to admit the pure light of day; an artificial luster,
provided by lamps and tapers, prevailed eternally in that earthly
purgatory.

Sometimes the stillness of death, the solemn silence of the tomb reigned
throughout that place: then the awful tranquillity would be suddenly
broken by the dreadful shrieks, the prayers, the lamentations, and the
scourges of the penitents.

The spectacle of these unfortunate creatures, with their naked forms
writhing and bleeding beneath the self-inflicted stripes, which they
doubtless rendered as severe as possible in order to escape the sooner
from that terrible preparation for their novitiate--this spectacle, we
say, was so appalling to the contemplation of Flora, that she seldom
quitted her own cell to set foot in the chamber of penitence. But there
were times when her thoughts became so torturing, and the solitude of
her stone chamber so terrible, that she was compelled to open the door
and escape from those painful ideas and that hideous loneliness, even
though the scene merely shifted to a reality from which her gentle
spirit recoiled in horror and dismay.

But circumstances soon gave her a companion in her cell. For, on the
second night of her abode in that place, t