He took a step forward, his great fist clenched, his glasses blazing. I don’t know how he might not have forgotten himself, had not Lady Sophia come quickly between. “Hush!” she said. “It is all to end here, Father.” She turned quietly on me. “Father Pope is, I am sorry to say, justified. You have deceived us in more things than one, Diana. It is not so long, I must tell you, since I heard from the Sisters of les Madelonnettes that your original story of your unhappy mother’s death was false, she having but a few months ago returned penitent and broken to die in the very convent she had so shamed and disgraced.” I gazed at her, bewildered, for an instant, and then, as the truth penetrated me, with a horror and passion beyond control. “O,” I cried, “this is too much! And I believed her long dead of grief; and you never told me--never let me see her: and I think you are the wickedest woman in the world!” She stood staring at me, silent, as if stricken. “_Cave anguem!_” sneered the priest, with a brutal laugh. I turned upon the pale woman with a furious stamp. “Why did you never let me know? How dared you keep it from me? I will go to law about it and have you hanged!” “If I could have thought”--she began, in a whisper; “if I have by chance done wrong”-- “Wrong!” I cried violently, “you have done me nothing but wrong since I came here. You have always misunderstood and disbelieved in me; and now, it seems, you had no right to adopt me at all.” I ended with a torrent of tears. “I want to leave you,” I sobbed; “I want to go away into the convent, and be at peace where no one can hate and slander me.” “Ha!” said Father Pope, moving, and hunching his shoulders, “then there our wishes jump, and no time like the present. So go collect your duds.” “Diana!” whispered madam again, in her stunned way, and made a little movement towards me. But I shrunk from her, shivering. “No, don’t touch me--_please_,” I said. “I’ll go to the Sisters, who’ll be kind to me. I’ll do anything you want--only not stop here.” I saw her put her hand to her heart as I tottered from the room. Then I ran upstairs, and hurried to put some little properties together. I quite acquiesced in the movement--was eager to hasten it, in fact. The truth is, that, of Wellcot and the convent, the latter appeared to me by far the less formidable as a present asylum. Any further meeting here between me and Noel was rendered virtually impossible; nor was it likely that the outraged spinster would prove so accommodating to our purposes as the artless little fatties across the valley. One need have no fear of being buried alive in a dovecot. While I was hastily collecting a few necessaries, my sweet girl crept in, and made a little sweet nuisance of herself, distressing and impeding me.