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 could justly express: at the expiration of that period, worn out with ill treatment, and agonized by beholding my benevolent protector in continual disquietude on my account, I determined, with a kind of desperate resolution, to terminate that disquietude and my indignities, by retiring to a cloister: but how impossible is it to express the pangs with which I formed and announced this resolution: yet what, you will say, could have occasioned those pangs? surely not the idea of renouncing a world which contained no tender friend to supply the place of the one I had lost?—

"Alas! it then contained a being dearer to me than life itself:—St. Julian, the Marquis of Montmorenci's son, visited at my uncle's, and had not long been known ere he was beloved! Those who knew him could not have wondered at my sudden attachment; every virtue, every grace which ennobles and adorns humanity he appeared to possess. Oh! St. Julian, Heaven surely endowed you with every virtue; for candour