you must not allow the most indissoluble of all bonds to unite you to him
till the back-slider has learnt to walk firmly. Follow him step by step,
hold him up with faithful care, never despair of him if he seems other
than what you had hoped. Make it your duty, pious soul, to render him
worthy of grace--but do not be in a hurry to speak the final yes--do not
say it yet."

Paula yielded, though unwillingly, to this last word of counsel; but, in
fact, Orion's fault had filled the abbess with deep distrust. So great a
sinner, under the blight, too, of a father's curse, ought, in her
opinion, to have retired from the world and besieged Heaven for grace and
a new birth, instead of seeking joys, such as she thought none but the
most blameless--and, those of her own confession--could deserve, in union
with so exceptional a creature as her beloved Paula. Indeed, having
herself found peace for her soul only in the cloister, after a stormy and
worldly youth, she would gladly have received the noble daughter of her
old friend as the Bride of Christ within those walls, to be, perhaps, her
successor as Mother Superior. She longed that her darling should be
spared the sufferings she had known through the ruthlessness of faithless
men; so she would not abate a jot of the tenor of her advice, or cease to
impress on Paula, firmly though lovingly, the necessity of following it.
At last Paula took leave of her, bound by a promise not to pledge herself
irrevocably to Orion till his return from Doomiat, and till the abbess
had informed her by letter what opinion she had formed of him in the
course of their flight.

The high-spirited girl had not shed so many tears, as in the course of
this interview, since the fatal affair at Abyla where she had lost her
father and brother; it was with a tear-stained face and aching head that
she had made her way back, under the scorching mid-day sun, to Rufinus'