f penitence and peace.
Alas! the effects of her frailty were but too apparent; and that
benighted girl would become a mother--_had she long enough to live_!"

These last words were uttered with terrible significancy; and the nun
turned aside, leaving Flora and the countess each a prey to the most
unspeakable horror.

In the meantime the helpless victim of ecclesiastical vengeance--the
poor erring creature, who had dared and sacrificed everything for the
love of her seducer--had risen from her suppliant posture, and flown
wildly--madly round to the elder nuns in succession, imploring mercy,
and rending the very roof of the subterrane with piercing screams. But
those to whom she appealed turned a deaf ear; for a convent is a tomb in
which all human sympathies are immured--a vortex wherein all the best
feelings that concrete in the mortal heart are cruelly engulfed!

And while this wretched girl--for she was scarcely yet a woman, although
were life spared her, on the way to maternity--was thus fruitlessly
imploring the mercy of hearts that were stern and remorseless, the hymn
continued, and the bell tolled at short intervals.

Suddenly at a particular verse in the funeral chant, the three nuns who
usually did the bidding of the lady abbess, glided noiselessly--but
surely, like black serpents--toward the victim--seized her in their
powerful grasp--and bore her to the cell in which she was to be immured.

The choir of nuns raised their voices, and the bell now clanged quickly
with its almost deafening note--and those human and metallic sounds
combined to deaden the screams that burst from the miserable girl, on
whom the huge door at length closed with fearful din.

The massive bolts were drawn--the key turned harshly in the lock and
still the shrieks came from within the sepulcher where a human being was
_entombed alive_!

So sickening a sensation came over Flora and the countess, when the last
act of the awful tragedy was thus concluded, that they reeled back to
their cell with brains so confused, and such horrible visions floating
before their eyes, that their very senses appeared to be abandoning
them.

When they were enabled to collect their scattered ideas, and the
incidents of the last half-hour assumed a definite shape in their
memories, the sound of hymn and bell had ceased--the chamber of
penitence was deserted--the silence of death reigned throughout the
subterrane--nor did even the faintest shriek or scre