but less gloomy. From her arrival in England, Violante had been taught
a grateful interest in the name of Harley L'Estrange. Her father,
preserving a silence that seemed disdain of all his old Italian
intimates, had been pleased to converse with open heart of the
Englishman who had saved where countrymen had betrayed. He spoke of the
soldier, then in the full bloom of youth, who, unconsoled by fame, had
nursed the memory of some hidden sorrow amidst the pine-trees that cast
their shadow over the sunny Italian lake; how Riccabocca, then honoured
and happy, had courted from his seclusion the English signore, then the
mourner and the voluntary exile; how they had grown friends amidst
the landscapes in which her eyes had opened to the day; how Harley
had vainly warned him from the rash schemes in which he had sought to
reconstruct in an hour the ruins of weary ages; how, when abandoned,
deserted, proscribed, pursued, he had fled for life, the infant Violante
clasped to his bosom, the English soldier had given him refuge, baffled
the pursuers, armed his servants, accompanied the fugitive at night
towards the defile in the Apennines, and, when the emissaries of a
perfidious enemy, hot in the chase, came near, had said, "You have your
child to save! Fly on! Another league, and you are beyond the borders.
We will delay the foes with parley; they will not harm us." And not
till escape was gained did the father know that the English friend
had delayed the foe, not by parley, but by the sword, holding the pass
against numbers, with a breast as dauntless as Bayard's on the glorious
bridge.

And since then, the same Englishman had never ceased to vindicate his
name, to urge his cause; and if hope yet remained of restoration to land
and honours, it was in that untiring zeal.

Hence, naturally and insensibly, this secluded and musing girl had
associated all that she read in tales of romance and chivalry with
the image of the brave and loyal stranger. He it was who animated her
drearhs of the Past, and seemed born to be, in the destined hour, the
deliverer of the Future. Around this image grouped all the charms that
the fancy of virgin woman can raise from the enchanted lore of old
Heroic Fable. Once in her early girlhood, her father (to satisfy her
curiosity, eager for general description) had drawn from memory a sketch
of the features of the Englishman,--drawn Harley, as he was in that
first youth, flattered and idealized, no doubt