Doña Anita, seated on a stone bench by the side of the Abbess, with her hand in the elder lady's, and her head resting on her shoulder, was speaking to her in a faltering voice and broken sentences which found difficulty in passing her parted lips, while the tears silently ran down her cheeks, which suffering had rendered pale.
"My kind mother," she said, and her voice, was harmonious as the sigh of an Æolian harp, "I know not how to thank you for your inexhaustible kindness towards me. Alas! you are at present my only friend; why may I not be allowed to remain always by your side? I should be so glad to take my vows and pass my life in this convent under your benevolent protection."
"My dear child," the Abbess said gently, "God is great, his power is infinite; hence, why despair? Alas! doubt leads to denial; you are still almost a child. Who knows what joy and happiness the future may still have in store for you?"
The maiden gave a heavy sigh. "Alas!" she murmured, "the future no longer exists for me, my kind mother; a poor orphan, abandoned without protection to the power of an unnatural relation, I must endure fearful tortures, and, under his iron yoke, lead a life of suffering and grief."
"Child," the Abbess said, with gentle sternness, "do not blaspheme; you are still ignorant, I repeat, of what the future may have in store for you. You are ungrateful at this moment—ungrateful and selfish."
"I ungrateful! holy mother!" the maiden objected.
"Yes, you are ungrateful, Anita, to us and to yourself. Do you consider it nothing, after the frightful misfortune that burst on you, to have returned to this convent in which your childhood was spent, and to have found among us that family which the world refused you? Is it nothing to have near you hearts that pity you, and voices that incessantly urge you to have courage?"
"Courage, sister," Doña Helena's sweet voice said at this moment, like a soft echo.
The maiden hid her lovely tear-bedewed face in the bosom of the Mother Superior.
"Pardon me, mother," she continued, "pardon me, but I am crushed by this struggle, which I have carried on so long without hope. The courage you attempt to give me cannot, in spite of my efforts, penetrate to my heart, for I have the fatal conviction that, whatever you may do, you will not succeed in preventing the frightful misfortune suspended over my head."