palace, and many other cities, till we came to the great Emperor's
court. There for two years or more we lived in pomp and merriment,
for it was a wonderful court, full of mimes, magicians, philosophers
and poets; and the Empress's ladies spent their days in mirth and
music, dressed in light silken garments, walking in gardens of
roses, and bathing in a great cool marble tank, while the Emperor's
eunuchs guarded the approach to the gardens. Oh, those baths in the
marble tank, my Father! I used to lie awake through the whole hot
southern night, and think of that plunge at sunrise under the last
stars. For we were in a burning country, and I pined for the tall
green woods and the cold stream of my father's valley; and when I
had cooled my limbs in the tank I lay all day in the scant cypress
shade and dreamed of my next bath.

My mother pined for the coolness till she died; then the Empress put
me in a convent and I was forgotten. The convent was on the side of
a bare yellow hill, where bees made a hot buzzing in the thyme.
Below was the sea, blazing with a million shafts of light; and
overhead a blinding sky, which reflected the sun's glitter like a
huge baldric of steel. Now the convent was built on the site of an
old pleasure-house which a holy Princess had given to our Order; and
a part of the house was left standing with its court and garden. The
nuns had built all about the garden; but they left the cypresses in
the middle, and the long marble tank where the Princess and her
ladies had bathed. The tank, however, as you may conceive, was no
longer used as a bath; for the washing of the body is an indulgence
forbidden to cloistered virgins; and our Abbess, who was famed for
her austerities, boasted that, like holy Sylvia the nun, she never
touched water save to bathe her finger-tips before receiving the
Sacrament. With such an example before them, the nuns were obliged