The Mysteries of Udolpho

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.