his on the ground floor at the back, opening on to the
garden and the pine forest that goes up the hill.

"What happened after that nobody ever knew exactly. In the middle of the
night the servants heard two pistol shots, and next morning my sister
was found dead--shot to the heart through an open window as she lay in
my father's bed.

"The authorities tried in vain to trace the criminal. Only one person
had any idea of his identity. That was my father, and in his fierce
anger he asked himself what he ought to do in order to punish the man
who had killed his daughter.

"Then a strange thing happened. On the day before the funeral the young
musician walked into my father's room. His face was white and wasted,
and his eyes were red and swollen. He had come to ask if he might be
allowed to be one of those to carry the coffin. My father consented.
'I'll leave him alone,' he thought. 'The man is punished enough.'

"All the people of Albano came to the funeral and there was not a dry
eye as the cortege passed from our chapel to the grave. Everybody knew
the story of my sister's hopeless love, but only two in the world knew
the secret of her tragic death--her young lover, who was sobbing aloud
as he staggered along with her body on his shoulder, and her old father,
who was walking bareheaded and in silence, behind him."

My heart was beating audibly and the Reverend Mother stroked my hand to
compose me--perhaps to compose herself also. It was now quite dark, the
stars were coming out, and the bells of the two monasteries on opposite
sides of the lake were ringing the first hour of night.

"That's my sister's story, Mary," said the Reverend Mother after a
while, "and the moral of my own is the same, though the incidents are
different.

"I was now my father's only child and all his remaining hopes centred in
me. So he set himself to find a husband for me before the time came when
I should form an attachment for myself. His choice fell on a
middle-aged Roman noble of distinguished but impoverished family.

"'He has a great name; you will have a great fortune--what more do you
want?' said my father.

"We were back in Rome by this time, and there--at school or elsewhere--I
had formed the conviction that a girl must passionately love the man she
marries, and I did not love the Roman noble. I had also been led to
believe that a girl should be the first and only passion of the man who
marries her, and, young as I was, I kne