How can I describe the tone of her voice, which was wholly new and peculiar; but which penetrated even into my inmost heart! She began her confession. Every word that she uttered rivetted more and more my attention, and ruled, like a supernatural charm, over my feelings. She confessed, in the first place, that she cherished a forbidden love, with which she had long struggled in vain; and this love was so much the more sinful, because holy vows for ever fettered the object of her affection. Yet, in this hopeless delirium of her despair, she had many times cursed the bonds, however sacred, which held them thus asunder.--She here faltered--paused--then, with a torrent of tears, which almost stifled her utterance, added, "Thou thyself, Medardus, art the consecrated being whom I so unspeakably love!" As if in deadly convulsions, all my nerves irresistibly vibrated. I was out of myself. An impulse, till now never known, almost raged in my bosom. A passionate desire to behold her features--to press her to my heart--to perish at once in delight and despair--wholly took possession of me! A moment of pleasure to be purchased by an eternity of pain! She was now silent; but I heard still the deep heaving of her breath. In a kind of wild despair, I violently summoned up all my strength. In what words I answered her, I cannot now remember, nor durst I look on her as she departed; but I perceived that she silently rose up, and retired; while, with the cloth curtains firmly pressed upon my eyelids, I remained fixed, motionless, and almost unconscious, in the confessional. * * * * * By good chance, no one else came into the church, and I had an opportunity, therefore, to escape quietly into my cell. How completely different all things now appeared to me! How foolish--how insipid all my former endeavours! I had not seen the countenance of the unknown; and yet, by the force of my own imagination, her image lived within my heart. She looked on me with her mild blue eyes, in which tears were glistening, and from which glances fell into my soul like consuming fire, which no prayer and no penitential exercises any more could extinguish. Such penitence, indeed, I did not spare; but, on the contrary, chastised myself with the knotted cords of our order, till blood streamed from my mangled flesh, that I might, if possible, escape from that eternal destruction by which I was now threatened. * * * * * There was an altar in our church dedicated to St Rosalia; and her picture, admirably painted, was hung over it, representing the Saint at the moment when she suffered martyrdom. In this picture, which had never particularly struck me before, I now at once recognised the likeness of my beloved! Even her dress exactly resembled the foreign habit of the unknown!