ward was silently
caressing, "I must take Leonard away. Adieu! all of you, till to-morrow
at dinner. Miss Violante, is the doll to have blue eyes or black?"

Violante turned her own black eyes in mute appeal to Lady Lansmere, and
nestled to that lady's side as if in refuge from unworthy insult.

CHAPTER XII.

"Let the carriage go to the Clarendon," said Harley to his servant; "I
and Mr. Oran will walk to town. Leonard, I think you would rejoice at an
occasion to serve your old friends, Dr. Riccabocca and his daughter?"

"Serve them! Oh, yes." And there instantly returned to Leonard the
recollection of Violante's words when, on leaving his quiet village,
he had sighed to part from all those he loved; and the little dark-eyed
girl had said, proudly, yet consolingly, "But to SERVE those you love!"
He turned to L'Estrange, with beaming, inquisitive eyes.

"I said to our friend," resumed Harley, "that I would vouch for your
honour as my own. I am about to prove my words, and to confide the
secrets which your penetration has indeed divined,--our friend is not
what he seems." Harley then briefly related to Leonard the particulars
of the exile's history, the rank he had held in his native land, the
manner in which, partly through the misrepresentations of a kinsman he
had trusted, partly through the influence of a wife he had loved, he had
been drawn into schemes which he believed bounded to the emancipation
of Italy from a foreign yoke by the united exertions of her best and
bravest sons.

"A noble ambition!" interrupted Leonard, manfully. "And pardon me, my
Lord, I should not have thought that you would speak of it in a tone
that implies blame."

"The ambition in itself was noble," answered Harley; "but the cause to
which it was devoted became defiled in its dark channel through
Secret Societies. It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political
combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous
members are ever mixed the most sordid interests, and the fiercest
passions of mean confederates. When those combinations act openly, and
in daylight, under the eye of Public Opinion, the healthier elements
usually prevail; where they are shrouded in mystery, where they
are subjected to no censor in the discussion of the impartial and
dispassionate, where chiefs working in the dark exact blind obedience,
and every man who is at war with law is at once admitted as a friend of
freedom, the history of the w