"But I suppose you grew reconciled?" "We grow reconciled to the worst in time," she answered, dreamily gazing into the fire with her strange eyes. "I pressed down my despair into myself at first, and I looked out for the opportunity to run away. We were as closely kept as the nuns in their cells, in their barred rooms, in their grated chapel; but, sooner than not have had my will and get away, I would have set the place on fire!" "I say, mademoiselle, don't you talk treason!" cried Herbert, laughing. "Do you think I would not?" she answered, turning to him, a gleaming look in her eyes. "But I had to wait for the opportunity to escape; and, while I waited, news came that my mother had died. She caught cold one night when she was in her evening robe, and it settled in her throat, and formed a dépôt, and she died. And so it was all over with my escape! My mother gone, I had nowhere to fly to. And I stopped in that enfer seven years." "You are complimentary to convents, Bianca. Maudite in one breath, enfer in another!" "They are all that, and worse!" intemperately responded the Italian girl. "They are--mais n'importe; c'est fini pour moi. I had to beat down my heart then, and stop in one. Ah! I know not how I did it. I look back and wonder. Seven years!" "But who paid for you all that time?" "My mother was not poor. She had enough for that. She made the arrangements with a priest when she was dying, and paid the money to him. The convent educated me, and dressed me, and made me hard. Their cold rules beat down my rebellious heart; beat it down to hardness. I should not have been so hard but for that convent!" "Oh, you are hard, then?" was the remark of Herbert Dare. "I can be!" nodded Mademoiselle Varsini. "Better not cross _me_!" "And how did you get out of the convent?" "When I was nineteen, they sent me out into a situation, to teach music and my own language, and French and English. They taught well in the convent: I could speak English then as readily as I speak it now: and they gave me a box of clothes and four five-franc pieces, saying that was the last of my mother's effects. What cared I? Had they turned me out penniless, I should have jumped to go. I served in that first situation two years. It was easy, and it was good pay." "French people?" "But certainly: Parisians. It was not more than one mile from the convent. There was but one little pupil." "Why did you leave?" "I was put into a passion one day, and madame said after that she was frightened to keep me. Ah! I have had adventures, I can tell you. In the next place I did not stay three months; the ennui came to me, and I left it for another that I found; and the other one I liked--I had my liberty. I should have stayed in that, but one came and turned me out of it." "A fresh governess?"