Word after word, phrase after phrase had cut her and stabbed her to the quick, and when Beatrice had thrust the miniature into her hands her wrath had risen in spite of herself.
But now that she had returned to a state in which she could think connectedly, and now that she saw Beatrice asleep before her, she did not regret what she had unwittingly done.

From the first moment when, in the balcony over the church, she had realised that she was in the presence of the woman she hated, she had determined to destroy her.

To accomplish this she would in any case have used her especial weapons, and though she had intended to steal by degrees upon her enemy, lulling her to sleep by a more gentle fascination, at an hour when the whole convent should be quiet, yet since the first step had been made unexpectedly and without her will, she did not regret it.
She leaned back and looked at Beatrice during several minutes, smiling to herself from time to time, scornfully and cruelly.

Then she rose and locked the outer door and closed the inner one carefully.

She knew from long ago that no sound could then find its way to the corridor without.
She came back and sat down again, and again looked at the sleeping face, and she admitted for the hundredth time that evening, that Beatrice was very beautiful.
"If he could see us now!" she exclaimed aloud.
The thought suggested something to her.