"'You!' I cried. 'A holy cardinal the author of a falsehood that has separated a father from his daughter for eighteen years, and that will perhaps keep them apart forever! I honor my father for his present distrust of you. If you lied to him in my infancy, what wonder that he should deem you to be lying now?' "The cardinal waved his hand deprecatingly. 'The end sanctifies the means, and my end is a noble one.' "Curiosity overcame my anger. Despite my aversion to the cardinal, I could not refrain from plying him with questions; the names of my father and my sister; their station in life; their abode, and the like. "But Cardinal Ravenna remained inflexibly uncommunicative. It was in vain that I knelt before him, and with tears entreated that he would let me see my father and sister face to face. "'My presence may move them,' I said. "'Your presence, my daughter, would create confusion,' he said coldly. 'Leave to me the task of winning for you a splendid heritage. Till then you must remain in this convent.' "And with that Ravenna took his departure. "The new knowledge imparted by the cardinal contributed rather to embitter than to cheer my life. It was not a pleasant reflection that somewhere in the world I had both father and sister who had never seen me, and who, apparently, had no desire to see me. "For this state of affairs the cardinal, according to his own statement, was responsible, and I hated him for it. He cared nothing for the feelings of parent and child; his only object in bringing the two together was to advance his own interests; he would exact a price both from the father and from the new daughter. "I resolved to cast off the self-constituted guardianship of Cardinal Ravenna. I would quit the convent, and, making my way to Warsaw, endeavor to discover the friends of my girlhood. "But when I conferred with Abbess Teresa she told me kindly, yet firmly, that this could not be; the cardinal had left strict orders that I must be detained till his return. "From that time my freedom ceased. The walks which I had been accustomed to take outside the convent in the company of two attendant nuns were stopped. The cloister gardens were open to me; once I had deemed them spacious, now they seemed very narrow. Though treated kindly in other ways I knew myself to be a prisoner watched by innumerable eyes. "The cardinal came not to release me. And thus eight months passed,--the most melancholy time I had ever known. "At last the porter, Bulgar, with whom I had always been a favorite, listened to my pleading, and one dark night, by preconcerted arrangement with me, he left the convent-gate unlocked, and I stole forth.