story of her life, and some of whom would certainly have wished out of curiosity to enter into nearer acquaintance with her while within the convent, while not intending to prolong their intercourse with her any further.  It could not be expected, indeed, that in a city like Prague such a woman as Unorna could escape notice, and the fact that little or nothing was known of her true history had left a very wide field for the imaginations of those who chose to invent one for her.  The common story, and the one which on the whole was nearest to the truth, told that she was the daughter of a noble of eastern Bohemia who had died soon after her birth, the last of his family, having converted his ancestral possessions into money for Unorna’s benefit, in order to destroy all trace of her relationship to him.  The secret must, of course, have been confided to some one, but it had been kept faithfully, and Unorna herself was no wiser than those who mused themselves with fruitless speculations regarding her origin.  If from the first, from the moment when, as a young girl, she left the convent to enter into possession of her fortune she had chosen to assert some right to a footing in the most exclusive aristocracy in the world, it is not impossible that the protection of the Abbess might have helped her to obtain it.  The secret of her birth would, however, have rendered a marriage with a man of that class all but impossible, and would have entirely excluded her from the only other position considered dignified for a well-born woman of fortune, unmarried and wholly without living relations or connections—­that of a lady-canoness on the Crown foundation.  Moreover, her wild bringing-up, and the singular natural gifts she possessed, and which she could not resist the impulse to exercise, had in a few months placed her in a position from which no escape was possible so long as she continued to live in Prague; and against those few—­chiefly men—­who for her beauty’s sake, or out of curiosity, would gladly have made her acquaintance, she raised an impassable barrier of pride and reserve.  Nor was her reputation altogether an evil one.  She lived in a strange fashion, it is true, but the very fact of her extreme seclusion had kept her name free from stain.  If people spoke of her as the Witch, it was more from habit and half in jest than in earnest.  In strong contradiction to the cruelty which she could exercise ruthlessly when roused to anger, was her well-known kindness to the poor, and her charities to institutions founded for their benefit were in reality considerable, and were said to be boundless.  These explanations seem necessary in order to account for the readiness with which she turned to the convent when she was in danger, and for the facilities which were then at once offered her for a stay long or short, as she should please to make it.  Some of the more suspicious nuns looked grave when they heard that she was under their roof; others, again, had been attached to her during the time she had formerly spent among them; and there were not lacking those who, disapproving of her presence, held their peace, in the anticipation that the rich and eccentric lady would on departing present a gift of value to their order.