gave the servant for a keepsake a look which that servant carried with
her in fearful remembrance to her grave. It seemed as if Kate had
tropic blood in her veins, that continually called her away to the
tropics. It was all the fault of that 'blue rejoicing sky,' of those
purple Biscayan mountains, of that tumultuous ocean, which she beheld
daily from the nunnery gardens. Or, if only half of it was _their_
fault, the other half lay in those golden tales, streaming upwards even
into the sanctuaries of convents, like morning mists touched by
earliest sunlight, of kingdoms overshadowing a new world which had been
founded by her kinsmen with the simple aid of a horse and a lance. The
reader is to remember that this is no romance, or at least no fiction,
that he is reading; and it is proper to remind the reader of real
romances in Ariosto or our own Spenser, that such martial ladies as the
_Marfisa_, or _Bradamant_ of the first, and _Britomart_ of the other,
were really not the improbabilities that modern society imagines. Many
a stout man, as you will soon see, found that Kate, with a sabre in
hand, and well mounted, was but too serious a fact.

The day is come--the evening is come--when our poor Kate, that had for
fifteen years been so tenderly rocked in the arms of St. Sebastian and
his daughters, and that henceforth shall hardly find a breathing space
between eternal storms, must see her peaceful cell, must see the holy
chapel, for the last time. It was at vespers, it was during the
chanting of the vesper service, that she finally read the secret signal
for her departure, which long she had been looking for. It happened
that her aunt, the Lady Principal, had forgotten her breviary. As this
was in a private 'scrutoire, she did not choose to send a servant for
it, but gave the key to her niece. The niece, on opening the
'scrutoire, saw, with that rapidity of eye-glance for the one thing
needed in any great emergency, which ever attended her through life,