From these, however, she was now relieved,
and all the circumstances of her father's conduct were fully explained:
but her heart was oppressed by the melancholy catastrophe of her
amiable relative, and by the awful lesson, which the history of the
nun exhibited, the indulgence of whose passions had been the means of
leading her gradually to the commission of a crime, from the prophecy
of which in her early years she would have recoiled in horror, and
exclaimed--that it could not be!--a crime, which whole years of
repentance and of the severest penance had not been able to obliterate
from her conscience.