Roseline had formed an early friendship with a young lady educated in the Bungay nunnery, of which her aunt, fortunately for the young people, was the superior. This sweet victim of ambition was designed by a proud and haughty father for the monastic life, in order to enable him to provide more liberally for the rest of the children. She had not yet however entered on the year of her novitiate; but it was soon to commence, and, at its awful close, she was to bid a final adieu to that world, to which her heart had of late become too tenderly and anxiously attached. As it approached, time seemed to wing his flight with redoubled rapidity, and she felt a trembling dread that her fortitude, like a false friend, would forsake her in the hour of trial, and a trembling presentiment that the moment, which shut her from the society at the castle, would exclude her from every prospect of happiness; yet this repugnance to obey the will of her parents was new to her mind:--she dared not investigate the cause too nicely, lest she should find a subject for self-condemnation. She found, with painful regret, a troublesome guest was admitted to her bosom, and she was afraid, in attempting to become more intimately acquainted with its prevailing influence, she should permit the stranger to gain greater ascendancy. The youthful Madeline, on her first entrance into the nunnery, had neither felt nor shewn any discontent: she had assumed the formal and unbecoming habit without a sigh, and yielded to the rigid rules prescribed with uncomplaining resignation; but, as time crept on with solemn and leaden pace, unrelieved by any of the innocent amusements of social life, only to repeat and bring forward the same dull round of gloomy and mortifying scenes, not only repugnant to the feelings of nature, but disgusting to the senses, she began to think and to complain to the bosom of friendship, that those fetters, put on by the rigid will of unfeeling parents, to be finally closed by the iron laws of bigotry and superstition, were unjust and galling, and the free-born soul of innocence and virtue drooped and pined beneath the sacred walls by which it was inclosed;--how cruel to make religion a pretext for such persecution and misery, and to counteract the designs of the Creator, who never formed his creatures for seclusion from that world in which he had profusely strewn so many blessings for the enjoyment of rational and social beings!