On hearing these words, Don Francesco was amazed by the courage and patience of Eustochia; completely won over by them to the side of the gentle speaker, he could find no words sufficient to praise her constancy or to express his enthusiastic approval of her resolution to cleave to her vocation. All he suggested was that she should change her convent for another; but this she declined to do. This interview with Don Francesco resulted, ultimately, in some little amelioration of Eustochia’s existence; the Abbess now taking her part against the rest of the community, she was permitted to leave the cell (in which she had been confined some three months by order of the higher authorities) for the infirmary, where she was to help in tending the sick. She was forbidden, however, to appear either in choir or in church during the hours of service, or to show herself in the parlour, or to have any relations of any kind with the outside world—and, most especially, she was not to speak to any one, whosoever, of her sufferings from the demon. And when she met any of the sisters, they showed their detestation of Eustochia by lowering their eyes or turning their backs on her; nobody who could help it came near her, nobody spoke to her; for to one and all—the chaplain and the Abbess only excepted—she was an object of horror and of aversion. Through all these trials nothing had been more painful to Eustochia than the knowledge that the sisters sometimes believed her to be only feigning possession in order to obtain their sympathy and commiseration. But, at this point, it seemed as though the evil spirit himself was determined to change their mind in respect to the reality of his presence among them by redoubling the fury of his onslaught upon Eustochia; thenceforth invisible hands daily inflicted upon her the most barbarous violence, maltreating her in a thousand ways, so as often to bring her within a short distance of expiring from the effects of it. At times it was as if he had scourged her with whips of metal; while, at others, it seemed as though her body had been slashed with knives. At times, again, Eustochia was dragged along the ground to the door of the convent as if her foe were bent upon casting her out from it into the street; and then she would be lifted up by an unseen power into the air, and let to fall, senseless and head downward, upon the stone floor with a crash—so that all wondered how it was that she escaped without a fractured skull. Again and again a deep puncture was made by the same unseen agency in the side of her neck, causing an extensive flow of blood; and once she was carried up on to the tiles of the convent roof by the invisible power and held suspended in the abyss over the street below, in the sight of the whole community, that cried aloud upon Heaven to protect her. And not until the chaplain came, to command the evil spirit that it should bring Eustochia down immediately