She was now seven years old, timid and crushed by suffering, but with her heart full of charity and faith; nevertheless, her father, being tempted by the father of lies, fell into the belief that Lucrezia, in revenge for his cruelty to her, was minded to poison him—and so he resolved to murder her. From this intention, however, the tempter, having no mind presumably that Lucrezia should be killed and pass in all her innocence to a better world—dissuaded Bellini, so that he changed his mind and sent her instead to the Convent of San Prosdocimo, in the city of Padua, there to finish her education. Now, during the latter half of the Fifteenth Century, in Italy it was not unusual to find convents of religious orders in which the strict practice of the rules laid down centuries earlier for their guidance by the holy founders of those same orders had become in the course of time somewhat relaxed. The Rule—the very backbone, so to speak, of a religious community—had grown, through long, indulgent gentleness on the part of Superiors, so mild as to be no longer suitable to the special necessities of the enclosed life; there was too much intercourse allowed with the outer world, the affairs and interests of which had come in consequence to occupy too large a part in the thoughts and natural sympathies of those called by their vocation to lead the higher spiritual existence of the cloister. And so we find that many bishops and abbots and abbesses devoted themselves particularly to the task of bringing back their “houses” to the close observance of their various original “Rules”—Franciscan, Dominican, Benedictine, and others. The convent of San Prosdocimo belonged to the Benedictines, but, unhappily, it was one of those houses that had fallen into slackness, and into which had crept the habit of worldly conversation and of carelessness in regard to the strict observance of the regulations, imposed by their most illustrious father and founder, for the guidance of his spiritual children. It was, then, to the care of the somewhat relaxed sisterhood of San Prosdocimo that Lucrezia was committed by her father; and, within a short time of her entry as a pupil into the convent, although the youngest of its occupants in years, she showed herself far the ripest in all goodness, the best balanced, and the most intelligent. Of a cheerful temperament, a lively and captivating personality, Lucrezia was never frivolous or superficial; but, preserving her habitual state of recollection in calm and solitude, her life was one continual prayer. For her patrons she chose three—the Mother of God, Saint Jerome, and Saint Luke the evangelist.