“The difficulties, too, of my position were very great. The Abbess was kindness itself to me, and bade me stay with my mother as long as I pleased, but she was constantly asking me questions as to my family and connections, and I, not knowing how much of my mother’s story had been confided to her, was fearful of betraying my mother every hour of the day. Latterly, however, all these anxieties gave way to one more terrible than all. Little as I knew of such cases, I felt sure that my mother was in a state bordering on madness, and every day that passed increased her danger. Isola, who came daily to see us, had but one thought in her mind, how to save my mother, and was for ever suggesting to me some wild plan, which I felt to be either wrong or impracticable. At one time she would propose I should receive a letter, informing me of your death; at another she suggested I should frame some story that would prove you to be utterly base, and unworthy of any woman’s love. But that I could not do, for deep down in my heart there was a feeling I could not explain, nor put into words, but which made me angry or indignant whenever Isola began to anathematize you. “At length, one evening after I had gone to my own room, utterly worn out with my mother’s excitement and misery, a sudden thought came into my head. ‘Why not gratify her, why not enable her to see the man she so blindly worships?’ Then it flashed across my mind how easily the thing could be done! I had but to assume my mother’s nun’s dress and hood, and no ordinary observer could have told it was not my mother herself. She in my dress would easily be permitted to pass the portress’s lodge, and once outside the convent walls Isola would be at hand with further disguises, if necessary, and means of facilitating the journey to England. “I felt, as you may imagine, I was incurring heavy responsibility in acting thus. But what was to be done? I had no one to advise me. I knew that you ought to be communicated with, and it was simply an impossibility for me to leave my mother in the state she was in. Once I had hinted at the advisability of my going back to consult with you as to what ought to be done, but she became perfectly frantic at the bare thought of such a thing, and throwing herself at my feet, had implored me ‘not to quench the last ray of light in her life.’