“Donna Clara was now advancing with measured step to proffer a bottle of curious essences, which she drew from a pocket of a depth beyond calculation, when one of the female attendants, aware of her favourite habits, proposed reviving her by the scent of the flowers that clustered round the frame of the casement; and collecting a handful of roses, offered them to Isidora. The sight and scent of these beautiful flowers, revived the former associations of Isidora; and, waving away her attendant, she exclaimed, “There are no roses like those which surrounded me when he beheld me first!”--“He!--who, daughter?” said the alarmed Donna Clara. “Speak, I charge you, sister,” said the irritable Fernan, “to whom do you allude?”--“She raves,” said the priest, whose habitual penetration discovered there was a secret,--and whose professional jealousy decided that no one, not mother or brother, should share it with him; “she raves--ye are to blame--forbear to hang round and to question her. Madonna, retire to rest, and the saints watch round your bed!” Isidora, bending thankfully for this permission, retired to her apartment; and father Jose for an hour appeared to contend with the suspicious fears of Donna Clara, and the sullen irritability of Fernan, merely that he might induce them, in the heat of controversy, to betray all they knew or dreaded, that he might strengthen his own conjectures, and establish his own power by the discovery. “Scire volunt secreta domus, et inde timeri.” And this desire is not only natural but necessary, in a being from whose heart his profession has torn every tie of nature and of passion; and if it generates malignity, ambition, and the wish for mischief, it is the system, not the individual, we must blame.