is assistance. At the moment when
he stationed himself at his window, he saw, on the black wall of the
courtyard, a circle of light, in the centre of which the silhouette of
Juana was clearly defined; the consecutive movement of the arms, and the
attitude, gave evidence that she was arranging her hair for the night.

"Is she alone?" Montefiore asked himself; "could I, without danger,
lower a letter filled with coin and strike it against that circular
window in her hiding-place?"

At once he wrote a note, the note of a man exiled by his family to Elba,
the note of a degraded marquis now a mere captain of equipment. Then he
made a cord of whatever he could find that was capable of being turned
into string, filled the note with a few silver crowns, and lowered it in
the deepest silence to the centre of that spherical gleam.

"The shadows will show if her mother or the servant is with her,"
thought Montefiore. "If she is not alone, I can pull up the string at
once."

But, after succeeding with infinite trouble in striking the glass, a
single form, the little figure of Juana, appeared upon the wall. The
young girl opened her window cautiously, saw the note, took it, and
stood before the window while she read it. In it, Montefiore had given
his name and asked for an interview, offering, after the style of the
old romances, his heart and hand to the Signorina Juana di Mancini--a
common trick, the success of which is nearly always certain. At Juana's
age, nobility of soul increases the dangers which surround youth. A poet
of our day has said: "Woman succumbs only to her own nobility. The lover
pretends to doubt the love he inspires at the moment when he is most
beloved; the young girl, confident and proud, longs to make sacrifices
to prove her love, and knows the world and men too little to continue
calm in the midst of her rising emotions and repel with contempt the man
who accepts a life offered in expiation of a false reproach."

Ever since the constitution of societies the young girl finds herself
torn by a struggle between the caution of prudent virtue and the evils
of wrong-doing. Often she loses a love, delightful in prospect, and the
first, if she resists; on the other hand, she loses a marriage if she
is imprudent. Casting a glance over the vicissitudes of social life
in Paris, it is impossible to doubt the necessity of religion; and
yet Paris is situated in the forty-eighth degree of latitude, while
Tarragona is