pale face.

"These wretches are practising on her," he said, in wrath,--"filling her
head with frightful images, and torturing her sensitive conscience till
she sees sin in the most natural and innocent feelings."

He had learned from Father Antonio the intention of Agnes to go on a
pilgrimage, and he longed to see and talk with her, that he might offer
her his protection against dangers which he understood far better than
she. It had never even occurred to him that the door for all possible
communication would be thus suddenly barred in his face.

"Very well," he said to himself, with a darkening brow,--"let them have it
their own way here. She must pass through my dominions before she can
reach Rome, and I will find a place where I _can_ be heard, without priest
or grandmother to let or hinder. She is mine, and I will care for her."

But poor Agnes had the woman's share of the misery to bear, in the fear
and self-reproach and distress which every movement of this kind cost her.
The involuntary thrill at seeing her lover, at hearing from him, the
conscious struggle which it cost her to throw back his gift, were all
noted by her accusing conscience as so many sins. The next day she sought
again her confessor, and began an entrance on those darker and more chilly
paths of penance, by which, according to the opinion of her times, the
peculiarly elect of the Lord were supposed to be best trained. Hitherto
her religion had been the cheerful and natural expression of her tender
and devout nature according to the more beautiful and engaging devotional
forms of her Church. During the year when her confessor had been,
unconsciously to himself, led by her instead of leading, her spiritual
food had been its beautiful old hymns and prayers, which she found no
weariness in often repeating. But now an unnatural conflict was begun in
her mind, directed by a spiritual guide in whom every natural and normal
movement of the soul had given way before a succession of morbid and
unhealthful experiences. From that day Agnes wore upon her heart one of
those sharp instruments of torture which in those times were supposed to
be a means of inward grace,--a cross with seven steel points for the seven
sorrows of Mary. She fasted with a severity which alarmed her grandmother,
who in her inmost heart cursed the day that ever she had placed her in the
way of saintship.

"All this will just end in spoiling her beauty,--making her as thin as a
sha