Sister Alba now approached Flora and the countess, and said in a low whisper, "The vengeance of the conventual discipline is terrible on those who sin! That miserable girl completed her novitiate five months ago; and the night before she was to take the veil she escaped. This awful crime she committed for the sake of some man she had known ere she first entered the convent, and for whom she thus endangered her immortal soul. But her justly incensed relations yesterday discovered her retreat; and she was restored to this house of penitence and peace. Alas! the effects of her frailty were but too apparent; and that benighted girl would become a mother--_had she long enough to live_!" These last words were uttered with terrible significancy; and the nun turned aside, leaving Flora and the countess each a prey to the most unspeakable horror. In the meantime the helpless victim of ecclesiastical vengeance--the poor erring creature, who had dared and sacrificed everything for the love of her seducer--had risen from her suppliant posture, and flown wildly--madly round to the elder nuns in succession, imploring mercy, and rending the very roof of the subterrane with piercing screams. But those to whom she appealed turned a deaf ear; for a convent is a tomb in which all human sympathies are immured--a vortex wherein all the best feelings that concrete in the mortal heart are cruelly engulfed! And while this wretched girl--for she was scarcely yet a woman, although were life spared her, on the way to maternity--was thus fruitlessly imploring the mercy of hearts that were stern and remorseless, the hymn continued, and the bell tolled at short intervals. Suddenly at a particular verse in the funeral chant, the three nuns who usually did the bidding of the lady abbess, glided noiselessly--but surely, like black serpents--toward the victim--seized her in their powerful grasp--and bore her to the cell in which she was to be immured. The choir of nuns raised their voices, and the bell now clanged quickly with its almost deafening note--and those human and metallic sounds combined to deaden the screams that burst from the miserable girl, on whom the huge door at length closed with fearful din. The massive bolts were drawn--the key turned harshly in the lock and still the shrieks came from within the sepulcher where a human being was _entombed alive_! So sickening a sensation came over Flora and the countess, when the last act of the awful tragedy was thus concluded, that they reeled back to their cell with brains so confused, and such horrible visions floating before their eyes, that their very senses appeared to be abandoning them.