"Of the house of Gilford of that ilk in Lothian," continued the recluse with tearless composure. "In his earlier days, when young, gallant, and winsome, with an honoured name and spotless scutcheon, Randal Clermont became my lover and my husband. Oh, how happy I was for a time; how loving and beloved! But a change came over the unstable heart of my husband. His political intrigues and private excesses soon ruined our fortune, deprived me of his love and him of my esteem. We were driven into exile, and retired to Paris. There he plunged madly into a vortex of the lowest dissipation, and spent the last of my dowry, my jewels, and everything. He became a drunkard, a bully, and a gamester, if not worse. Long, long I endured without a murmur or reproach his pitiless cruelty and cutting contempt, until he eloped with one who in better days had been my companion and attendant, an artful wretch named Beatrix Gilruth. He joined the army of Mareschal Crecquy as a volunteer, and I saw him no more. Hearing afterwards that he was in Scotland fighting under the standard of the Covenant, and being driven to despair by the miseries into which he had plunged me, by leaving me a prey to destitution in a foreign land, I resolved to quit the world for ever; I have come of an old Catholic family, and a convent was my first thought. "Our child, for we had one, our child was alternately a source of torment and delight," continued the poor nun, weeping bitterly--"my torment from the resemblance it bore to its perfidious father, and my delight as the only tie that bound me to earth; I resolved to see it no more, and sent the poor infant to Scotland in charge of a faithful female servitor, to whom I gave a letter for my husband, purporting to be written on my deathbed, and a ring he had given me in happier days. In an agony of grief I saw the woman depart, and gave her all I possessed, a few louis-d'ors I had acquired at Paris, where I had supported myself as a fleuriste, and was patronized by the Scottish Archers, who were ever very kind to me. I considered myself as dead to the world from that hour, and immediately commenced my noviciate in the licensed convent of St. Ursula in French Flanders. "Here again all the wounds of my heart were torn open by tidings that the ship in which my loved little boy and his nurse embarked had perished at sea; whether they perished too God alone knoweth, for I heard of them no more. And now the fierce stings of remorse increased the sadness of my sorrow, and I upbraided myself with cruelty, with lack of fortitude and such resignation as became a Christian. I accused myself of infanticide, and in my thoughts by day and my dreams by night I had ever before me the sunny eyes and golden hair of my little child, and its lisping accents in my dreaming ear awoke me to tears and unavailing sorrow." Here the poor nun again paused and wept bitterly.