The moment I was free, I hurried palpitating to my friend, and confessed all, and implored her, by the love between us, to play her part in the little innocent deception I had practised. She gazed at me with her sweet shocked eyes, as if I were inviting her to murder. “You really meant them for him, for Father Pope?” she whispered, half choking. “O, Diana! It was blasphemy!” “It was,” I said, “to waste the Princess Camilla on such a block.” Then, as my friend still cried out, I knelt, and took her waist prisoner in my arms, and begged to her. “I am not like you, darling. I pine and pinch in this cold air. If it was not for you, you little warm thing, I should run away with Giles, the handsome stable-boy.” “Don’t,” she wept. “You don’t mean it. Say you only intended it for a joke!” “Of course I only meant it for a joke,” I said, urging her; “though it’s true I believed the creature was expecting it of me. But ’tis a joke that will cost me dear if you don’t back me.” “O!” she cried, despairing, “I do, I will. But how can I ever pretend to have wrote them, when that cat rhymes with lap is the best I know of verse.” “You little dear,” I said, laughing in sheer love of her artlessness. “Pretend nothing, but hold your tongue.” That she would have done for me, I think, though they racked her to confess; and all might yet have gone well, had not the Lady Sophia, meddlesome like most self-righteous consciences, sent for her to question if, after all, her simple verses might not have been the instinctive expression of _her_ leaning towards the cloister. My poor transparent angel managed to articulate a panic denial of any such tendency; though, indeed, there was no need to, to any but a blindworm. If ever little maid was built for loving, or to lay her pretty hair in a puddle for some rogue to reach heaven by, it was she. The sense of guilt would confound her, however; and, what between her duty to madam and her loyalty to me, she must have answered her examination so ambiguously as to raise some new doubts and suspicions in the minds of her inquisitors. She flew back to me with very red eyes, and a fresh horror of the imposition she was forced to practise. “I will never, never tell,” she sobbed, “though they tear me to pieces. But O, Diana! I don’t want to be a nun.” I comforted her, though furious with the others for their Jesuitical practices on her innocence. “Wait,” I cried, “and I will pay them both out! What right had they, after what I said, to try and torture a lie out of you? Don’t fear for the convent, child. I pledge my word you shall have a husband and fifty children, nun or no nun.” “I want no husband,” she answered, blushing and clinging to me, “and no lover but you.”