lthy merchant; she lacked no virtue necessary
to the highest destiny. Perez had intended taking her to Madrid and
marrying her to some grandee, but the events of the present war delayed
the fulfilment of this project.
"I don't know where the Marana now is," said Perez, ending the above
history, "but in whatever quarter of the world she may be living, when
she hears of the occupation of our province by your armies, and of the
siege of Tarragona, she will assuredly set out at once to come here and
see to her daughter's safety."
CHAPTER II. AUCTION
The foregoing narrative changed the intentions of the Italian captain;
no longer did he think of making a Marchesa di Montefiore of Juana di
Mancini. He recognized the blood of the Maranas in the glance the girl
had given from behind the blinds, in the trick she had just played to
satisfy her curiosity, and also in the parting look she had cast upon
him. The libertine wanted a virtuous woman for a wife.
The adventure was full of danger, but danger of a kind that never
daunts the least courageous man, for love and pleasure followed it. The
apprentice sleeping in the shop, the cook bivouacking in the kitchen,
Perez and his wife sleeping, no doubt, the wakeful sleep of the aged,
the echoing sonority of the old mansion, the close surveillance of the
girl in the day-time,--all these things were obstacles, and made success
a thing well-nigh impossible. But Montefiore had in his favor against
all impossibilities the blood of the Maranas which gushed in the heart
of that inquisitive girl, Italian by birth, Spanish in principles,
virgin indeed, but impatient to love. Passion, the girl, and Montefiore
were ready and able to defy the whole universe.
Montefiore, impelled as much by the instinct of a man of gallantry as
by those vague hopes which cannot be explained, and to which we give
the name of presentiments (a word of astonishing verbal accuracy),
Montefiore spent the first hours of the night at his window, endeavoring
to look below him to the secret apartment where, undoubtedly, the
merchant and his wife had hidden the love and joyfulness of their old
age. The ware-room of the "entresol" separated him from the rooms on the
ground-floor. The captain therefore could not have recourse to noises
significantly made from one floor to the other, an artificial language
which all lovers know well how to create. But chance, or it may have
been the young girl herself, came to h
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