"You see, my dear daughter," said the mother superior to Dolores, "I grant you all you desire, and, although the rules of the house forbid promenades in the garden after nightfall, I have consented to stay here until half-past seven o'clock, our supper hour, which will soon sound."
"I thank you, madame," said Dolores, with a slight Spanish accent, and in a voice deliciously resonant. "I feel that this promenade will do me good."
"You must call me mother and not madame, my dear daughter, I have already told you that it is the custom here."
"I will conform to it, if I can, madame."
"It is difficult to call a person mother who is not your mother," said Dolores, with a sigh.
"I am your spiritual mother, my dear daughter; your mother in God, as you are, as you will be, my daughter in God; because you will leave us no more, you will renounce the deceitful pleasures of a perverse and corrupt world, you will have here a heavenly foretaste of eternal peace."
"You will live in prayer, silence, and meditation."
"Well, well, my dear daughter, after all, what will you sacrifice?"
"I like that response, my dear daughter; really, it is nothing, less than nothing, these wicked and worldly passions which cause us so much sorrow and throw us in the way of perdition."
"Just Heaven! it makes me tremble to think of it, madame."
"The Lord inspires you to answer thus, my dear daughter, and I am sure now that you can hardly understand how you have been able to love this miscreant captain."
"It is true, madame, I was stupid enough to dream of happiness and the joys of family affection; criminal enough to find this happiness in mutual love and hope to become, like many others, a devoted wife and tender mother; it was, as you have told me, an offence to Heaven. I repent my impious vows, I comprehend all that is odious in them; you must pardon me, madame, for having been wicked and silly to such a degree."
"It is not necessary to exaggerate, my dear daughter," said Sister Prudence, struck with the slightly ironical accent with which Dolores had uttered these last words. "But," added she, observing the direction taken by the young girl, "what is the good of returning to this walk? It will soon be the hour for supper; come, my dear daughter, let us go back to the house."