d
been obliged to leave his daughter, and the daughter remembered those
terrible three days like a frightful dream, the recollection of which
made her shudder.

Major Ponsonby had inherited no patrimony--he possessed only the small
income derived from his office, and a slender pension, which rewarded
many wounds; but, in the pleasant place in which their lot was cast,
these moderate means obtained for them not merely the necessaries, but
all the luxuries of life. They inhabited in the town a palace worthy
of the high, though extinct nobility, whose portraits and statues
lined their lofty saloons, and filled their long corridors and graceful
galleries; and about three miles from the town, on a gentle ascent
facing the ocean, and embowered in groves of orange and olive trees, the
fanciful garden enclosed in a thick wall of Indian fig and blooming
aloes, was a most delicate casino, rented at a rate for which a garret
may not be hired in England; but, indeed, a paradise. Of this pavilion
Miss Ponsonby was the mistress; and here she lived amid fruit and
flowers, surrounded by her birds: and here she might be often seen at
sunset glancing amid its beauties, with an eye as brilliant, and a step
as airy, as the bright gazelle that ever glided or bounded at her side.

CHAPTER II.

_A Fair Presentment_

ONE summer day, when everybody was asleep in the little sultry city
where Major Ponsonby, even in his siesta, watched over the interests
of British commerce--for it was a city, and was blessed with the holy
presence of a bishop--a young Englishman disembarked from an imperial
merchant brig just arrived from Otranto, and, according to custom, took
his way to the Consul's house. He was a man of an age apparently verging
towards thirty; and, although the native porter, who bore his luggage
and directed his path, proved that, as he was accompanied not even by
a single servant, he did not share the general reputation of his
countrymen for wealth, his appearance to those practised in society
was not undistinguished. Tall, slender, and calm, his air, though
unaffected, was that of a man not deficient in self-confidence; and
whether it were the art of his tailor, or the result of his own good
frame, his garb, although remarkably plain, had that indefinable style
which we associate with the costume of a man of some mark and breeding.

On arriving at the Consul's house, he was ushered through a large, dark,
cool hall, at th