Natura was all this time in the utmost perplexity, not only at the usage he imagined had been given him by Elgidia, but also for the loss of his horses; and at being told when he came home, that two women, in riding habits, well mounted, but without any attendants, had been to enquire for him:—­all these things, the meaning of any one of which he was not able to fathom, so filled his head, that he could not take any repose:—­pretty early in the morning, a letter was brought him from Elgidia, which he hastily opened, but found nothing in it, but what served to heighten his amazement and discontent.

She told him that she could not dispense with letting him know the occasion of her breach of promise; that intending nothing more than to perform it, she was hastening to the arbour, when, in the middle of the garden, she was met by an apparition, which, as near as she could discern, had the resemblance of herself;—­that the terror she was in had obliged her to retire; and that as she could look on what she had seen, as no other than a warning from Heaven, she had determined to use her utmost endeavours for extinguishing a passion obnoxious to its will; to which end she desired he would make no farther attempts to engage her to an act so contrary to her duty, or even ever to see her more.

Natura had so little notion of spirits and ghosts, that at first he took this story only as a pretence, to cover a levity he had not suspected her to be guilty of; but when he reflected on the silence of the person he had taken for her, and the description of those who had been to enquire for him, he began to imagine, as he had not the least thought of the abbess, that something supernatural had indeed walked the garden that night, and had also been at his own lodgings in order to perplex him more:—­a thousand little tales he had been told in his infancy, concerning the tricks played on mortals by those shadowy beings, now came fresh into his mind; and as the belief of what Elgidia had wrote gained ground in him, was not far from being of her opinion, that it was a warning from Providence, and to repent of having attempted to snatch from the altar a woman devoted to it.

It is doubtless accidents such as this, that have given rise to so many stories of apparitions, as have been propagated in the world; and had not Natura been afterwards informed of the whole truth, it is likely he would have been as great a defender of these ideas, as any who are accounted superstitious:—­but however that might have been, it wrought so strongly on his mind at present, that joined with the considerations of those perpetual perplexities which must infallibly attend an ecclesiastical intrigue; besides, those which the abbess would involve him in, made him resolve to obey Elgidia’s commands, and pursue the matter no farther, but go directly to the baron d’ Eyrac’s, who he heard was still at his country-house.