Unorna gradually regained her self-possession.  After all, Beatrice had told her nothing which she did not either wholly know or partly guess, and her anger was not the result of the revelation but of the way in which the story had been told.  Word after word, phrase after phrase had cut her and stabbed her to the quick, and when Beatrice had thrust the miniature into her hands her wrath had risen in spite of herself.  But now that she had returned to a state in which she could think connectedly, and now that she saw Beatrice asleep before her, she did not regret what she had unwittingly done.  From the first moment when, in the balcony over the church, she had realised that she was in the presence of the woman she hated, she had determined to destroy her.  To accomplish this she would in any case have used her especial weapons, and though she had intended to steal by degrees upon her enemy, lulling her to sleep by a more gentle fascination, at an hour when the whole convent should be quiet, yet since the first step had been made unexpectedly and without her will, she did not regret it.

She leaned back and looked at Beatrice during several minutes, smiling to herself from time to time, scornfully and cruelly.  Then she rose and locked the outer door and closed the inner one carefully.  She knew from long ago that no sound could then find its way to the corridor without.  She came back and sat down again, and again looked at the sleeping face, and she admitted for the hundredth time that evening, that Beatrice was very beautiful.

“If he could see us now!” she exclaimed aloud.

The thought suggested something to her.  She would like to see herself beside this other woman and compare the beauty he loved with the beauty that could not touch him.  It was very easy.  She found a small mirror, and set it up upon the back of the sofa, on a level with Beatrice’s head.  Then she changed the position of the lamp and looked at herself, and touched her hair, and smoothed her brow, and loosened the black lace about her white throat.  And she looked from herself to Beatrice, and back to herself again, many times.

“It is strange that black should suit us both so well—­she so dark and I so fair!” she said.  “She will look well when she is dead.”

She gazed again for many seconds at the sleeping woman.

“But he will not see her, then,” she added, rising to her feet and laying the mirror on the table.

She began to walk up and down the room as was her habit when in deep thought, turning over in her mind the deed to be done and the surest and best way of doing it.  It never occurred to her that Beatrice could be allowed to live beyond that night.  If the woman had been but an unconscious obstacle in her path Unorna would have spared her life, but as matters stood, she had no inclination to be merciful.