While these events were transpiring on the boulevard, and a little before half after seven had sounded, another scene was taking place in the interior of the convent garden. Sister Prudence, the mother superior, and Dolores Salcedo were walking in the garden, notwithstanding the advanced hour of the evening. Dolores, a brunette of charming appearance, united in herself the rare and bewitching perfections of Spanish beauty. Hair of a blue black, which, when uncoiled, dragged upon the floor; a pale complexion warmed by the sun of the South; large eyes, by turns full of fire and languid sweetness; a little mouth as red as the bud of the pomegranate steeped in dew; a delicate and voluptuous form, tapering fingers, and an Andalusian foot and ankle, completed her list of charms. As to the exquisite grace of her figure and gait, one must, to have any idea of it, have seen the undulating movements of the beautiful senoras of Seville or Cadiz, when, speaking with their eyes or playing with their fans, they slowly promenade, a beautiful summer evening, on the marble floor of the Alameda. Dolores accompanied Sister Prudence. Walking and talking, the two women approached the wall behind which Captain Horace and his sailor had stopped. "You see, my dear daughter," said the mother superior to Dolores, "I grant you all you desire, and, although the rules of the house forbid promenades in the garden after nightfall, I have consented to stay here until half-past seven o'clock, our supper hour, which will soon sound." "I thank you, madame," said Dolores, with a slight Spanish accent, and in a voice deliciously resonant. "I feel that this promenade will do me good." "You must call me mother and not madame, my dear daughter, I have already told you that it is the custom here." "I will conform to it, if I can, madame." "Again!" "It is difficult to call a person mother who is not your mother," said Dolores, with a sigh. "I am your spiritual mother, my dear daughter; your mother in God, as you are, as you will be, my daughter in God; because you will leave us no more, you will renounce the deceitful pleasures of a perverse and corrupt world, you will have here a heavenly foretaste of eternal peace." "I begin to discover it, madame." "You will live in prayer, silence, and meditation." "I have no other desire, madame." "Well, well, my dear daughter, after all, what will you sacrifice?" "Oh, nothing, absolutely nothing!" "I like that response, my dear daughter; really, it is nothing, less than nothing, these wicked and worldly passions which cause us so much sorrow and throw us in the way of perdition." "Just Heaven! it makes me tremble to think of it, madame." "The Lord inspires you to answer thus, my dear daughter, and I am sure now that you can hardly understand how you have been able to love this miscreant captain."