in the convent, it was only by main force that the novice's dress was put on her, though her aunt and two other grim duennas assisted in the operation. Vieira appealed to the King; but it was too delicate an affair to be interfered with, even by an absolute monarch. He retired from the royal presence in anything but a loyal mood, and tasked his wits from day to day, but all in vain, to devise some means of communication with the prisoner. That convent, he says, baffled all his approaches, as if it were an enchanted castle. He determined, however, that if she could not see him she should hear him; so he seized his guitar, repaired to the convent walls at midnight, and serenaded her with passionate songs--walking round and round the gloomy den like Blondel round the Fortress Tenebreuse, the cage of Lion Richard; or, as the painter himself expressed it in one of his pictures, like Orpheus at the gates of hell demanding his Eurydice. He was for the third or fourth time turning a corner of the convent chapel when he was pounced upon by the police, and forthwith lodged in prison, and would inevitably have been transported, in a ship ready to depart for one of the Indian settlements, had not one of his patrons, the Conde del Assumar, afterwards Marquis de Alorna, interfered, and procured his release. The noviciate of Agnes expired, and she was compelled to take the veil. Her relations now thought that they had her safely settled for life, and the lady abbess thought so too. Agnes, making a virtue of necessity, pretended to be reconciled to her fate; and thenceforward the restraints on the seemingly submissive nun were far less stringent than those that had been imposed on the rebellious novice. A correspondence between the married nun and her husband was now effected through a third party, who had access to the convent. It was written in a cipher invented by Vieira, as a sure precaution against mischance or impertinent curiosity. "Heaven first taught letters for some wretch's aid, Some banished lover, or some captive maid."