“Mary,” said the Reverend Mother, “I want to tell you a story.  It is the story of my own life—­mine and my sister’s and my father’s.”

I was sitting by her side and she was holding my hand in her lap, and patting it, as she had done during the interview of the morning.

“They say the reason so few women become nuns is that a woman is too attached to her home to enter the holy life until she has suffered shipwreck in the world.  That may be so with most women.  It was not so with me.

“My father was what is called a self-made man.  But his fortune did not content him.  He wanted to found a family.  If he had had a son this might have been easy.  Having only two daughters, he saw no way but that of marrying one of us into the Italian nobility.

“My sister was the first to disappoint him.  She fell in love with a young Roman musician.  The first time the young man asked for my sister he was contemptuously refused; the second time he was insulted; the third time he was flung out of the house.  His nature was headstrong and passionate, and so was my father’s.  If either had been different the result might not have been the same.  Yet who knows?  Who can say?”

The Reverend Mother paused for a moment.  The boy’s voice in the vineyard was going on.

“To remove my sister from the scene of temptation my father took her from Rome to our villa in the hills above Albano.  But the young musician followed her.  Since my father would not permit him to marry her he was determined that she should fly with him, and when she hesitated to do so he threatened her.  If she did not meet him at a certain hour on a certain night my father would be dead in the morning.”

The Reverend Mother paused again.  The boy’s voice had ceased; the daylight was dying out.

“My sister could not bring herself to sacrifice either her father or her lover.  Hence she saw only one way left—­to sacrifice herself.”

“Herself?”

The Reverend Mother patted my hand.  “Isn’t that what women in tragic circumstances are always doing?” she said.

“By some excuse—­I don’t know what—­she persuaded our father to change rooms with her that night—­he going upstairs to her bedroom in the tower, and she to 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.’