Nor was the place in which she was a prisoner calculated to dissipate her gloomy reflections. It seemed a vast cavern hollowed out of the bowels of the earth, rendered solid by masonry and divided into various compartments. No windows were there to admit the pure light of day; an artificial luster, provided by lamps and tapers, prevailed eternally in that earthly purgatory. Sometimes the stillness of death, the solemn silence of the tomb reigned throughout that place: then the awful tranquillity would be suddenly broken by the dreadful shrieks, the prayers, the lamentations, and the scourges of the penitents. The spectacle of these unfortunate creatures, with their naked forms writhing and bleeding beneath the self-inflicted stripes, which they doubtless rendered as severe as possible in order to escape the sooner from that terrible preparation for their novitiate--this spectacle, we say, was so appalling to the contemplation of Flora, that she seldom quitted her own cell to set foot in the chamber of penitence. But there were times when her thoughts became so torturing, and the solitude of her stone chamber so terrible, that she was compelled to open the door and escape from those painful ideas and that hideous loneliness, even though the scene merely shifted to a reality from which her gentle spirit recoiled in horror and dismay. But circumstances soon gave her a companion in her cell. For, on the second night of her abode in that place, the noise of the well-known machinery was heard; the revolution of wheels and the play of the dreadful mechanism raised ominous echoes throughout the subterrane. Another victim came: all the cells were tenanted: and the new-comer was therefore lodged with Flora, whose own grief was partially forgotten, or at all events mitigated, in the truly Christian task of consoling a fellow-sufferer. Thus it was that the Countess of Arestino and Flora Francatelli became companions in the Carmelite convent. At first the wretched Giulia gave way to her despair, and refused all comfort. But so gentle, so willing, so softly fascinating were the ways of the beautiful Flora, and so much sincerity did the charming girl manifest in her attempts to revive that frail but drooping flower which had been thrown as it were at her feet; at the feet of her, a pure though also drooping rosebud of innocence and beauty: so earnest did the maiden seem in her disinterested attentions, that Giulia yielded to the benign influence, and became comparatively composed.