“God grant, my child, that experience may not teach you to think them rare and precious: I have found them but too much so! But tell me, Antonia; why is it impossible for me to have seen the abbot before?”

“Because since the moment when he entered the abbey, he has never been on the outside of its walls. He told me just now, that from his ignorance of the streets, he had some difficulty to find the Strada di San Iago, though so near the abbey.”

“All this is possible, and still I may have seen him before he entered the abbey: in order to come out, it was rather necessary that he should first go in.”

“Holy Virgin! As you say, that is very true.⁠—Oh! But might he not have been born in the abbey?”

Elvira smiled.

“Why, not very easily.”