d a female voice enquired,
in commanding tones, the cause of the uproar. Don Baltasar seemed to
recognise the voice, and he rode up beneath the window whence it
proceeded.

"Carmen," said he, "is it you?"

"Who is that?" was the rejoinder, in accents which surprise or alarm
rendered slightly tremulous.

"Baltasar," replied the officer. "I must see you instantly, on a matter
of life or death."

There was a moment's pause. "Remain where you are," said the person at
the window; "I will come down to you."

The portress, finding that the intruder was known to the lady abbess,
for she it was whom Baltasar had addressed as Carmen, now refastened the
gate, and crept grumbling to her cell. Don Baltasar waited. Presently a
door in the right wing of the convent was opened, a tall female form,
clothed in flowing drapery, and carrying a taper in her hand, appeared
at it and beckoned him to enter. Tying his horse to a ring in the wall,
he obeyed the signal.

The room into which, after passing through a corridor, Colonel
Villabuena was now introduced, was one of those appropriated to the
reception of guests and visitors to the convent. The apartment was
plainly furnished with a table and a few wooden chairs; and in a recess
hung a large ebony crucifix, before which was placed a hassock, its
cloth envelope worn threadbare by the knees of the devout. But if the
room of itself offered little worthy of note, the case was far different
with the person who now ushered Don Baltasar into it. This was a woman
about forty years old, possessed of one of those marked and
characteristic physiognomies which painters are fond of attributing to
the inhabitants of southern Europe. Her age was scarcely to be read upon
her face, whose slight furrows seemed traced by violent passions rather
than by the hand of time: she had the remains of great beauty, although
wanting in the intellectual; and the expression of her face, her
compressed lips, and the fixed look of her eyes, went far to neutralize
the charm which her regular features, and the classical oval of her
physiognomy, would otherwise have possessed. The outline of her tall
figure was veiled, but not concealed, by her monastic robe, from the
loose sleeves of which protruded her long thin white hands. After
closing the door, she seated herself beside a table, upon which she
reposed her elbow, and motioned her visiter to a chair. A slight degree
of agitation was perceptible in her manner, as