m shore
it carried with it the scent of lime-blossoms and flowering fields. Now
also was the season when the great civic and religious processions took
place, dyeing the water with sunset hues as they swept from the steps of
the Piazzetta to San Giorgio, the Redentore or the Salute. In the
fashionable convents the nuns celebrated the festivals of their patron
saints with musical and dramatic entertainments to which secular
visitors were invited. These entertainments were a noted feature of
Venetian life, and the subject of much scandalous comment among visitors
from beyond the Alps. The nuns of the stricter orders were as closely
cloistered as elsewhere; but in the convents of Santa Croce, Santa
Chiara, and a few others, mostly filled by the daughters of the
nobility, an unusual liberty prevailed. It was known that the inmates
had taken the veil for family reasons, and to the indulgent Venetian
temper it seemed natural that their seclusion should be made as little
irksome as possible. As a rule the privileges accorded to the nuns
consisted merely in their being allowed to receive visits in the
presence of a lay-sister, and to perform in concerts on the feast-days
of the order; but some few convents had a name for far greater license,
and it was a common thing for the noble libertine returned from Italy to
boast of his intrigue with a Venetian nun.

Odo, in the Procuratessa's train, had of course visited many of the
principal convents. Whether it were owing to the malicious pleasure of
contrasting their own state with that of their cloistered sisters, or to
the discreet shelter which the parlour afforded to their private
intrigues, the Venetian ladies were exceedingly partial to these visits.
The Procuratessa was no exception to the rule, and as was natural to one
of her complexion, she preferred the convents where the greatest freedom
prevailed. Odo, however, had hitherto found little to tempt him in these
glimpses of forbidden fruit. The nuns, though often young and pretty,
had the insipidity of women secluded from the passions and sorrows of
life without being raised above them; and he preferred the frank
coarseness of the Procuratessa's circle to the simpering graces of the
cloister.

Even Coeur-Volant's mysterious boast of a conquest he had made among the
sisters failed to excite his friend's curiosity. The Marquess, though
still devoted to Miranda, was too much the child of his race not to seek
variety in his emo