MAR. (earnestly and candidly.) I wish to remain with you, but my heart is not and can never be indifferent to the joys and hopes that made life dearest.
1st NUN. It need not be.
M. AUG. She should strive to make it so.
1st NUN. She is going to France, mother, where her young girlhood was spent. (Mother Augustus turns away.)
2d NUN. What a singular mask over that door!
MAR. I know all about that mask. I can’t explain the uncontrollable impulse that made me beg to know all about it and its hiding-place. Mr. Darblee finally, out of sheer courtesy, told me the secret, though up to that time no one but he and a nephew of his knew that there was a hiding-place connected with the mask at all.
1st NUN. How is it?
MAR. It seems very simple. The door beneath the mask is a sham one, the floor in the passage-way is high enough to permit one to look through the mask standing and a touch on a certain part of it opens a secret slide in the wall; an otherwise undiscoverable, impregnable hiding-place. It’s delightfully tricky! See. (she goes laughingly by a side door to the back of a door beneath the mask and looks through it.)
M. AUG. Mariana! Come down. (enter Mariana.) You should be ashamed of yourself to be such a child.
MAR. I can tell you the story of the mask. It is the mask of a dead pirate’s head. He was killed long ago for some atrocity or other and his mask placed in this room by the Governor’s order as a warning to the pirates who were in the habit of congregating in this place. The superstition obtained that when any of the pirates are in danger the spirit of the murdered man sends some human ear into his mask to baffle the plotters.