The Commendatore was a judge in the Court of Appeals and knew everything.

He would not even need to consult his books! His brain was an encyclopaedia of the law! She would go to him at once.
But Angela shook her head as she sat looking at the small wood fire in the old-fashioned red-brick fireplace.

Now that she had told her story she saw how very sure the Princess and the lawyer must have been to speak as they had both spoken.
But Madame Bernard put on her hat and went out to see the judge, who was generally at home late in the afternoon; and Angela sat alone in the dusk for a while, poking her little fire with a pair of very rusty wrought-iron tongs, at least three hundred years old, which would have delighted a collector but which were so heavy and clumsy that they hurt her hands.
Her aunt's piece of advice came back to her; she had better ask to be taken in at one of the convents which her father had enriched and where she would be received without a dowry.

She knew them both, and both were communities of cloistered nuns; the one was established in a gloomy mediaeval fortress in the heart of the city, built round a little garden that looked as unhealthy as the old Prioress's own muddy-complexioned face and stubbly chin; the other was shut up in a hideous modern building that had no garden at all.

She felt nothing but a repugnance that approached horror when she thought of either, though she tried to reprove herself for it because her father had given so much money to the sisters, and had always spoken of them to her as 'holy women.' No doubt they were; doubtless, too, Saint Anthony of Thebes had been a holy man, though it would have been unpleasant to share his cell, or even his meals.