"I don't care where she goes," said Elsie, ungraciously.
"There, now!" said Jocunda, coming out, "Agnes, your grandmother bids you go to the convent to say good-by to the sisters; so run along, there's a little dear. The Mother Theresa talks of nothing else but you since she heard that you meditated this; and she has broken in two her own piece of the True Cross which she's carried in the gold and pearl reliquary that the Queen sent her, and means to give it to you. One doesn't halve such gifts, without one's whole heart goes with them."
"Dear mother!" said Agnes, her eyes filling with tears, "I will take her some flowers and oranges for the last time. Do you know, Jocunda, I feel that I never shall come back here to this dear little home where I have been so happy,—everything sounds so mournful and looks so mournful!—I love everything here so much!"
"Oh, dear child, never give in to such fancies, but pluck up heart. You will be sure to have luck, wherever you go,—especially since the mother will give you that holy relic. I myself had a piece of Saint John Baptist's thumbnail sewed up in a leather bag, which I wore day and night all the years I was tramping up and down with my old man; but when he died, I had it buried with him to ease his soul. For you see, dear, he was a trooper, and led such a rackety up-and-down life, that I doubt but his confessions were but slipshod, and he needed all the help he could get, poor old soul! It's a comfort to think he has it."
"Ah, Jocunda, seems to me it were better to trust to the free love of our dear Lord who died for us, and pray to Him, without ceasing, for his soul."
"Like enough, dearie; but then, one can't be too sure, you know. And there isn't the least doubt in my mind that that was a true relic, for I got it in the sack of the city of Volterra, out of the private cabinet of a noble lady, with a lot of jewels and other matters that made quite a little purse for us. Ah, that was a time, when that city was sacked! It was hell upon earth for three days, and all our men acted like devils incarnate; but then they always will in such cases. But go your ways now, dearie, and I'll stay with your grandmamma; for, please God, you must be up and away with the sun to-morrow."
Agnes hastily arranged a little basket of fruit and flowers, and took her way down through the gorge, under the Roman bridge, through an orange-orchard, and finally came out upon the seashore, and so along the sands below the cliffs on which the old town of Sorrento is situated.
So cheating and inconsistent is the human heart, especially in the feminine subject, that she had more than once occasion to chide herself for the thrill with which she remembered passing the cavalier once in this orange-garden, and the sort of vague hope which she detected that somewhere along this road he might appear again.
"How perfectly wicked and depraved I must be," she said to herself, "to find any pleasure in such a thought of one I should pray never to meet again!"
And so the little soul went on condemning herself in those exaggerated terms which the religious vocabulary of conventual life furnished ready-made for the use of penitents of every degree, till by the time she arrived at the convent she could scarcely have been more oppressed with a sense of sin, if she had murdered her grandmother and eloped with the cavalier.