bbess, who, on the arrival
of the Nuncio, led the way to the garden, where a stage had been
erected.

The nuns who were not to take part in the play had been seated directly
under the stage, divided from the rest of the company by a low screen of
foliage. Ranged beneath the footlights, which shone on their bare
shoulders and white gowns, and on the gauze veils replacing their
monastic coifs, they seemed a choir of pagan virgins grouped in the
proscenium of an antique theatre. Everything indeed combined to produce
the impression of some classic festival: the setting of motionless
foliage, the mild autumnal sky in which the stars hung near and vivid,
and the foreground thronged with a motley company lit by the shifting
brightness of torches.

As Odo, in mask and travesty, stood observing the fantastically-dressed
audience, the pasteboard theatre adorned with statuary, and the nuns
flitting across the stage, his imagination, strung to the highest pitch
by his own impending venture, was thrilled by the contrast between the
outward appearance of the scene and its underlying reality. From where
he stood he looked directly at the abbess, who was seated with the
Nuncio and his suite under the tall crucifix in the centre of the
garden. As if to emphasise the irony of the situation, the torch fixed
behind this noble group cast an enlarged shadow of the cross over the
abbess's white gown and the splendid robes of her companions, who,
though they wore the mask, had not laid aside their clerical dress. To
Odo the juxtaposition had the effect of some supernatural warning, the
shadow of the divine wrath projected on its heedless ministers; an
impression heightened by the fact that, just opposite the cross, a
lively figure of Pan, surmounting the pediment of the theatre, seemed to
fling defiance at the Galilean intruder.

The nuns, like the rest of the company, were masked; and it had been
agreed between Odo and Fulvia that the latter should wear a wreath of
myrtle above her veil. As almost all her companions had chosen
brightly-coloured flowers this dark green chaplet was easily
distinguished among the clustered heads beneath the stage, and Odo had
no doubt of being able to rejoin Fulvia in the moment of dispersal that
should follow the conclusion of the play. He knew that the sisters were
to precede their guests and be locked behind the grate before the ball
began; but as they passed through the garden and cloisters the barrier
b