“That laugh made me cease, and lift up my eyes to him, as if I expected to see another being,--it was still the same. “And you dreamt,” he cried, “in your temerity, you dreamt of setting the vigilance of a convent at defiance? Two boys, one the fool of fear, and the other of temerity, were fit antagonists for that stupendous system, whose roots are in the bowels of the earth, and whose head is among the stars,--_you_ escape from a convent! _you_ defy a power that has defied sovereigns! A power whose influence is unlimited, indefinable, and unknown, even to those who exercise it, as there are mansions so vast, that their inmates, to their last hour, have never visited all the apartments;--a power whose operation is like its motto,--one and indivisible. The soul of the Vatican breathes in the humblest convent in Spain,--and you, an insect perched on a wheel of this vast machine, imagined you were able to arrest its progress, while its rotation was hurrying on to crush you to atoms.” While he was uttering these words, with a rapidity and energy inconceivable, (a rapidity that literally made one word seem to devour another), I tried, with that effort of intellect which seems like the gasping respiration of one whose breath has long been forcibly suppressed or suspended, to comprehend and follow him. The first thought that struck me was one not very improbable in my situation, that he was not the person he appeared to be,--that it was not the companion of my escape who now addressed me; and I summoned all the remains of my intellect to ascertain this. A few questions must determine this point, if I had breath to utter them. “Were you not the agent in my escape? Were you not the man who---- What tempted you to this step, in the defeat of which you appear to rejoice?”--“A bribe.”--“And you have betrayed me, you say, and boast of your treachery,--what tempted you to this?”--“A higher bribe. Your brother gave gold, but the convent promised me salvation,--a business I was very willing to commit to their hands, as I was totally incompetent to manage it myself.”--“Salvation, for treachery and murder?”--“Treachery and murder,--hard words. Now, to talk sense, was not yours the vilest treachery? You reclaimed your vows,--you declared before God and man, that the words you uttered before both were the babble of an infant; then you seduced your brother from his duty to his and your parents,--you connived at his intriguing against the peace and sanctity of a monastic institution, and dare _you_ talk of treachery? And did you not, with a callosity of conscience unexampled in one so young, accept, nay, cling to an associate in your escape whom you knew you were seducing from his vows,--from all that man reveres as holy, and all that God (if there be a God) must regard as binding on man? You knew my crime, you knew my atrocity, yet you brandished me as your banner of defiance against the Almighty, though its inscription was, in glaring