impelled to confide in another soul, to invite a
pitying eye to behold and share her inward suffering.

To the bishop above all, the most venerable priest she knew, she would
most readily have confessed everything and have submitted to any penance,
however severe, at his hands, but shame held her back; and even more did
another more urgent consideration. The prelate, she knew, would demand of
her that she should forsake her old life, root out from her soul the old
feelings and desires, and begin a new existence; but for this the time
had not yet come: her love was still an indispensable condition of life,
and her hatred was even more dear to her. When Paula's terrible doom
should indeed have overtaken her, and Katharina, her heart full of those
old feelings, had gloated over it; when she should have been able to
prove to Orion that her love was no less great and strong and
self-sacrificing than that of Thomas' daughter; when she should have
compelled him--as she would and must--to acknowledge that he had cruelly
misprized her and sinned against her; then, and not till then, would she
make peace with herself, with the Church, and with her Saviour. Nay, if
need be, she would take the veil and mourn away the rest of her young
life as a penitent, in a convent or a solitary rock-cell. But now--when
Paula, his betrothed, had done this great thing for him--to perish now,
with her love unseen, unknown, uncared for, perhaps forgotten by him, to
retire into herself and vanish from his ken--that was too much for human
nature! Sooner would she be lost forever; body and soul in everlasting
perdition, a prey to Satan and hell--in which she believed as firmly as
in her own existence.

So she went on nursing her mother, saw the red spots spread over the sick
woman's whole body--watched the fever that increased from day to day,
from hour to hour; listened with a mixture of horror and gladness--at
which she herself shuddered, though she fed her heart on it--to the
reports of the preparations for the sacrifice of the Bride of the Nile,
and to all the bishop could tell her of Paula, and her dying father, and
Orion. She trembled for little Mary, who had disappeared from the
neighboring garden, till she heard that the child had fled to escape the
cloister; each day she learnt that Heliodora, who had moved to the
gardener's house with her invalid, had as yet escaped the pestilence;
while in the prayers, which even now she never failed to offe