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if I know them already?" burst out Silvio.

      Giacinta looked grave.

      "If you know them already," she said, "it means – well, it means that somebody has been behaving like an idiot."

      "I, for instance!" exclaimed Silvio.

      "Certainly, you – before anybody, you. Afterwards – "

      "Afterwards – ?"

      "The woman who dropped the note that you have in your pocket."

      "Giacinta!"

      "Oh, I am not an imbecile, you know, Silvio. You were waiting for that woman to come away from her morning's lessons with Bianca, and I do not suppose it is the first time that you have waited for her – and – and, what is to be the end of it all, Heaven only knows," concluded Giacinta. It was a weak conclusion, and she was fully aware of the fact; but a look on Silvio's face warned her that she had said enough for the moment.

      He took his cigar from his lips and threw it out of the open window. Then, rising from his chair, he came and stood by his sister.

      "I will tell you the end of it," he said, very quietly – and his eyes seemed to send forth little flashes of light as he spoke. "The end of it will be that I will marry Bianca Acorari. You quite understand, Giacinta? Noble or not, heiress or not, I will marry her, and she will marry me."

      "But, Silvio – it is impossible – it is a madness – "

      "Basta! I say that I will marry her. Have I failed yet in anything that I have set myself to do, Giacinta? But you," he added, in a sterner voice than Giacinta had ever heard from him – "you will keep silence. You will know nothing, see nothing. If the time comes when I need your help, I will come to you and ask you to give it me, as I would give it you."

      Giacinta was silent for a moment. Then she plucked up her courage to make one more effort to stem the current of a passion that she felt would carry Silvio away with it, she knew not whither.

      "But the girl," she said, "she is almost a child still, Silvio. Have you thought what unhappiness you may bring upon her if – if the princess, and that priest who, they say, manages all her affairs, should prove too strong for you? You do not know; they might put her in a convent – anywhere – to get her away from you."

      Silvio Rossano swore under his breath.

      "Basta, Giacinta!" he exclaimed again. "I say that I will marry her."

      And then, before Giacinta had time to reply, he suddenly kissed her and went quickly out of the room.

      V

      Giacinto Rossano was quite mistaken in supposing the piece of paper she had seen her brother thrust into his pocket to have been still there when he returned to her after its pretended restoration to its rightful owner. As a matter of fact, a capricious April breeze was blowing its scattered remnants about the court-yard of Palazzo Acorari, for Silvio had torn it into little shreds so soon as he had read the words written upon it.

      She had been perfectly correct, however, in her other suppositions, for since Silvio had first beheld Donna Bianca in the church of the Sudario on Christmas night, he had certainly not wasted his time. He had been, it is true, considerably dismayed at learning from Giacinta who the girl was who had so immediate and so powerful an attraction for him. Had she been almost anything else than what she was, he thought to himself impatiently, the situation would have been a far simpler one; but between him and the heiress and last remaining representative of the Acorari, princes of Montefiano, there was assuredly a great gulf fixed, not in rank only, but in traditional prejudices of caste, in politics – even, it might be said, in religion – since Bianca Acorari no doubt implicitly believed all that the Church proposed to be believed, while he, like most educated laymen, believed – considerably less.

      Perhaps the very difficulties besetting his path made Silvio Rossano the more determined to conquer them and tread that path to the end. What he had said of himself to his sister, not in any spirit of conceit, but rather in the confident assurance which his youth and ardent temperament gave him, was true. When he had set his mind on success, he had always gained it in the end; and why should he not gain it now?

      After all, there were things in his favor. Although he might not be of noble blood, his family was a good and an old one. There had been Rossano in Rome before a peasant of the name of Borghese became a pope and turned his relations into princes. One of these early Rossano, indeed, had been a cardinal. But, unluckily for the family, he had also been a conscientious priest and an honest man – a combination rarely to be met with in the Sacred College of those days.

      But there were other things to which Silvio attached more weight – things of the present which must ever appeal to youth more than those of the past. His father was a distinguished man; and he himself might have – nay, would have – a distinguished career before him. Money, too, was not wanting to him. The professor was not a rich man; but he had considerably more capital to divide between his two children than many people possessed who drove up and down the Corso with coronets on their carriages, while their creditors saluted them from the pavements.

      And there were yet other things which Silvio, reflecting upon the wares he had to go to market with, thought he might fairly take into account, details such as good character, good health, and – well, for some reason or other, women had never looked unfavorably upon him, though he had hitherto been singularly indifferent as to whether they did so or not. Something – the professor would no doubt have found a scientific explanation of a radio-active nature for it – told him, even in that instant when he first met her glance, that Bianca Acorari did not find him antipatico. He wondered very much how far he had been able to convey to her his impressions as regarded herself.

      In an incredibly short space of time it had become absolutely necessary to him to satisfy his curiosity on this point – hence that sudden desire to attend the early masses at Santa Maria in Campitelli, which had done more than anything else to arouse Giacinta's suspicions.

      For some weeks, however, Silvio had been absolutely foiled in his attempts again to find himself near Bianca Acorari. He had very quickly realized that any efforts on his sister's part to improve her acquaintance with the girl would be detrimental rather than the reverse to his own objects, and he had, consequently, soon ceased to urge Giacinta to make them. But Silvio Rossano had not spent several years of his boyhood in drawing plans and making calculations for nothing; and he had set himself to think out the situation in much the same spirit as that in which he would have grappled with a professional problem demanding accurate solution.

      Occasionally he had caught glimpses of Bianca as she went out driving with the princess, and once or twice he had seen her walking in the early morning, accompanied by the same woman who had been with her in the Sudario. It had been impossible, of course, for him to venture to salute her, even if he had not fancied that her companion eyed him sharply, as though suspecting that his proximity was not merely accidental.

      Bettina was probably unconscious that she had been more than once the subject of a searching study on the part of the signorino of the second floor, as she called him. But the results of the study were negative, for Silvio had instinctively felt that any attempt to suborn Donna Bianca's maid would almost certainly prove disastrous. The woman was not young enough to be romantic, he thought, with some shrewdness, nor old enough to be avaricious.

      And so he had found himself obliged to discover a weaker point in the defences of Casa Acorari, and this time fortune favored him; though in those calmer moments, when scruples of conscience are apt to become so tiresome, he felt somewhat ashamed of himself for taking advantage of it.

      It had not escaped Silvio's notice that punctually at nine o'clock every morning a neatly dressed Frenchwoman entered Palazzo Acorari, and was admitted into the princess's apartment, and the porter informed him that she was the principessina's governess, who came from nine o'clock till twelve every day, excepting Sundays and the great feste.

      Silvio studied Donna Bianca's governess as he had studied her maid. Mademoiselle Durand was certainly much younger than the latter, and better looking. Moreover, unlike Bettina, she did not look at Silvio witheringly when she happened to meet

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