ecret which he professed to know. One night he
invited me to a subterranean restaurant, famous for its excellent
creature-comforts, and there over some royal English beer, without any
graces of style or attempts to exaggerate the incidents, he unfolded
what I believe to be a true record of unblessed love.

General readers are familiar with the fact that many a nun immures
herself for life under a sort of moral compulsion, because her high-born
family has become too indigent to maintain its stately style of living,
because the lady herself is in danger of contracting some degrading
alliance, declines peremptorily such connection as her relations
approve, or has committed some imprudence that clouds over her future
prospects. The secret influences which entangle men in the Catholic
orders correspond to this. It would be arrant bigotry to doubt that some
offer up an unstained heart, in aspirations for usefulness or sighs for
holiness; but many times a youth is led blindfold to the altar by
ambitious relatives, like Talleyrand, and discovers too late his perfect
unfitness for the vow he has assumed. And these last are they whose
lives become a scandal to their profession, whose levity shocks so many
Protestant observers, whose consciences have no true peace, who die
sometimes in open unbelief and, living, are the worst enemies of the
cause they advocate.

As my story goes, at nearly the same time that a gallant young man of
high family disappeared from the gay circles of Rome, a lovely girl of
distinguished parentage had suffered her blonde tresses to be shorn, her
graceful limbs draped in forlorn russet, her merry meetings with girlish
spirits like herself exchanged for the tears of the confessional, the
lengthened prayers of the cloister, the frequent fastings and sometimes
scourgings of monastic life. The cause of this contemporaneous
disappearance was known only to the most intimate friends of two
celebrated but no longer wealthy families, who deemed the sacrifice
necessary, and so recked not of the wounds it might make, the perjuries
it might tempt, the life-struggle of duty with feeling it might cause.

Time passed on. Forgotten by society, it was supposed these victims of
artificial life had forgotten the circles they were wont to charm,
forgotten almost themselves in a system most ingeniously arranged to
blot out one's individuality and to make its subject a perfectly ordered
part of a grand machine. But, unsuspec