to confess to you nor to ask
your forgiveness again that I am here, for you have no more right to a
confession than I have to your pardon.'

'That may be,' answered the nun, her tone relenting, 'but such as my
forgiveness can be, while I can still remember, you have it.'

Gambardella was visibly moved at this unexpected concession. He was
seated too far from her to touch her hand, but he put out his own humbly
towards the hem of her black skirt, then brought it back to his lips and
kissed it with reverence, as the very poor and wretched sometimes do in
Italy to express deep gratitude. She watched him, and there was the
faintest suggestion of a smile on her tightly closed lips. After a
little pause, during which their eyes met once, he spoke.

'I have come to inquire about a young Venetian lady and her
serving-woman, who took refuge with you last Saturday,' he said, with
perfect assurance, though he had no proof that the two were in the
convent.

The Mother Superior's face darkened.

'What are they to you?' she asked sternly.

This was a question which Gambardella was not prepared to answer
truthfully, and he had not foreseen it. He vaguely wondered what the
woman who had once loved him so well would say and do if she knew that
he had sunk to the condition of a paid Bravo, and had taken money from
one person to cut Ortensia's throat and from another to deliver her up a
prisoner, and was just now wondering how he could satisfy both his
patrons.

Until now he had seen a humorous element in his two abominable bargains;
but in the grim presence of his own past things looked differently. The
terrible eyes of the high-born woman he had loved and betrayed long ago,
when he was still called an honourable gentleman, were upon him now, and
he feared her as he had assuredly never feared any man in all his wild
life. She understood her power, and waited for him to speak.

But his fear only roused his faculties, and if he felt remorse when he
thought of what she had once been and of the life she was leading now,
by his fault, he knew well enough that as soon as she was out of his
sight he would feel nothing but a dim regret that would hardly hurt.

'I take a vicarious interest in the Lady Ortensia,' he said after a
little reflection. 'A friend of mine, who is travelling with me, is also
a friend of the man with whom she has run away, and who has been locked
up by mistake, as I dare say you have heard from her.'

'She has