s in
love with this fair creature?" Randal in love! no! He was too absorbed by
harder passions for that blissful folly. Nor, if he could have fallen in
love, was Violante the one to attract that sullen, secret heart; her
instinctive nobleness, the very stateliness of her beauty, womanlike
though it was, awed him. Men of that kind may love some soft slave--they
can not lift their eyes to a queen. They may look down--they can not look
up. But, on the one hand, Randal could not resign altogether the _chance_
of securing a fortune that would realize his most dazzling dreams, upon
the mere assurance, however probable, which had so dismayed him; and, on
the other hand, should he be compelled to relinquish all idea of such
alliance, though he did not contemplate the base perfidy of actually
assisting Peschiera's avowed designs, still, if Frank's marriage with
Beatrice should absolutely depend upon her brother's obtaining the
knowledge of Violante's retreat, and that marriage should be as conducive
to his interests as he thought he could make it, why--he did not then push
his deductions farther, even to himself--they seemed too black; but he
sighed heavily, and that sigh foreboded how weak would be honor and virtue
against avarice and ambition. Therefore, on all accounts, Riccabocca was
one of those cards in a sequence, which so calculating a player would not
throw out of his hand: it _might_ serve for repique at the worst--it might
score well in the game. Intimacy with the Italian was still part and
parcel in that knowledge which was the synonym of power.

While the young man was thus meditating, on his road to Norwood,
Riccabocca and his Jemima were close conferring in their drawing-room. And
if you could have there seen them, reader, you would have been seized with
equal surprise and curiosity; for some extraordinary communication had
certainly passed between them. Riccabocca was evidently much agitated, and
with emotions not familiar to him. The tears stood in his eyes at the same
time that a smile, the reverse of cynical or sardonic, curved his lips;
while his wife was leaning her head on his shoulder, her hand clasped in
his, and, by the expression of her face, you might guess that he had paid
her some very gratifying compliment, of a nature more genuine and sincere
than those which characterized his habitual hollow and dissimulating
gallantry. But just at this moment Giacomo entered, and Jemima, with her
native English mo