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 and fire a gun without winking. Yet she has a "tiny foot"—so at least Scott says—and she rides to hounds with her hair bound only by the traditional ribbon, so that her long tresses "stream on the breeze." The absurd and complicated plot in which she is involved is never disentangled. Dedicated in infancy to the cloister, which was at least unusual, she has been released by Rome from vows she has never taken, only on condition that she marries a cousin who is within the forbidden degree of kindred. Her numerous allusions to this circumstance—"The fatal veil was wrapped round me in my cradle," "I am by solemn contract the bride of Heaven, betrothed to the convent from the cradle"—distress and mystify poor Frank, who is not clever at best, and who accepts all her verdicts as irrevocable. Every time she bids him farewell, he believes it to be the end; and he loses the last flicker of