lante. "Now, here we shall be secure," said she;
"and here a few minutes may suffice to decide your fate."

As the door closed on Violante, who, now waking to suspicion, to alarm,
looked fearfully round the dark and dismal hall, Beatrice turned: "Let
the carriage wait."

The Italian who received the order bowed and smiled; but when the two
ladies had ascended the stairs he re-opened the street-door, and said to
the driver, "Back to the count, and say, 'All is safe.'"

The carriage drove off. The man who had given this order barred and
locked the door, and, taking with him the huge key, plunged into the
mystic recesses of the basement and disappeared. The hall, thus left
solitary, had the grim aspect of a prison,--the strong door sheeted with
iron, the rugged stone stairs, lighted by a high window grimed with the
dust of years, and jealously barred, and the walls themselves abutting
out rudely here and there, as if against violence even from within.

CHAPTER VI.

It was, as we have seen, without taking counsel of the faithful Jemima
that the sage recluse of Norwood had yielded to his own fears and
Randal's subtle suggestions, in the concise and arbitrary letter which
he had written to Violante; but at night, when churchyards give up the
dead, and conjugal hearts the secrets hid by day from each other,
the wise man informed his wife of the step he had taken. And Jemima
then--who held English notions, very different from those which prevail
in Italy, as to the right of fathers to dispose of their daughters
without reference to inclination or repugnance--so sensibly yet so
mildly represented to the pupil of Machiavelli that he had not gone
exactly the right way to work, if he feared that the handsome count
had made some impression on Violante, and if he wished her to turn with
favour to the suitor he recommended,--that so abrupt a command could
only chill the heart, revolt the will, and even give to the
audacious Peschiera some romantic attraction which he had not before
possessed,--as effectually to destroy Riccabocca's sleep that night. And
the next day he sent Giacomo to Lady Lansmere's with a very kind letter
to Violante and a note to the hostess, praying the latter to bring his
daughter to Norwood for a few hours, as he much wished to converse
with both. It was on Giacomo's arrival at Knightsbridge that Violante's
absence was discovered. Lady Lansmere, ever proudly careful of the
world and its gossip, kept G