mblest, for she had neither rank nor wealth to
commend her; but her skill on the harpsichord had attracted the notice
of the music-mistress and she had been enrolled in the convent orchestra
before her novitiate was over. This had brought her into contact with a
few of the more favoured sisters, and among them she had recognised in
Sister Mary of the Crucifix the daughter of the nobleman who had been
her aunt's landlord at Treviso. Fulvia's name was not unknown to the
handsome nun, and the coincidence was enough to draw them together in a
community where such trivial affinities must replace the ties of nature.
Fulvia soon learned that Mary of the Crucifix was the spoiled darling of
the convent. Her beauty and spirit, as much perhaps as her family
connections, had given her this predominance; and no scruples interfered
with her use of it. Finding herself, as she declared, on the wrong side
of the grate, she determined to gather in all the pleasures she could
reach through it; and her reach was certainly prodigious. Here Odo had
been obliged to fall back on his knowledge of Venetian customs to
conjecture the incidents leading up to the scene of the previous night.
He divined that Fulvia, maddened by having had to pronounce the
irrevocable vows, had resolved to fly at all hazards; that Sister Mary,
unconscious of her designs, had proposed to take her on a party of
pleasure, and that the rash girl, blind to every risk but that of delay,
had seized on this desperate means of escape. What must have followed
had she not chanced on Odo, she had clearly neither the courage nor the
experience to picture; but she seemed to have had some confused idea of
throwing herself on the mercy of the foreign nobleman she believed she
was to meet.

So much Odo had gathered; and her voice, her gesture, the disorder of
her spirit, supplied what her words omitted. Not for a moment, either in
listening to her or in the soberer period of revision, did he question
the exact truth of her narrative. It was the second time that they had
met under strange circumstances; yet now as before the sense of her
candour was his ruling thought. He concluded that, whatever plight she
found herself in, she would be its immediate justification; and felt
sure he must have reached this conclusion though love had not had a
stake in the verdict. This perhaps but proved him the more deeply taken;
for it is when passion tightens the net that reason flaps her wings most