I find to be a hereditary enemy."

"What do you mean? He is but a boy and cannot have wronged you or
yours."

"His father, major, murdered my loveliest daughter and interrupted her
career of splendor! Alas! one that had a palace where kings were
received and to whom princes often sued in vain!"

"Halloa! you, to have a daughter of that calibre!" and he laughed
coarsely.

"You, who know everything, my officer, must at least have heard of the
peerless Iza, the original of the most beautiful statue
which--reproduced in the precious and the mean metals, in clay, in
parian, in plaster--made the round of the civilized world? 'The Bather!'
That was my daughter! She had her faults--even the truly lovely have
mental flaws, though bodily they are perfect--but whilst she lived, her
poor old mother dressed in silks and velvets--not in rags; she ate and
drank delicately, not sour crusts and sourer wine; she slept on down and
not in a cellar!"

Von Sendlingen shook his head; he was of the new generation and he
preserved but a dim remembrance of the noted beauties--the stars of the
living galaxy decorating the first cycle of the Bonapartist Restoration.

"I foresaw it all and I warned her; but she was so perverse! It is my
duty to avenge her, and to see that the same blunder is not made by--no
matter! Enough that my science--at which you smile, I see--points out to
me that your greatest enemies and mine are in that house." She gestured
toward the hotel, which the major had been studying.

"Do you say enemies in the plural?" he said, ceasing to curl his lip in
mocking of the witch.

"In that house are the Jewish couple, father and daughter, who played at
the Harmonista, La Belle Stamboulane and the Turkophonist Daniel, and
the young man who belabored your excellency so that he almost died of
the drubbing."

"Hang you for being so profuse in your explanations! How do you know all
this?"

"The servant-maid is a customer of mine. I tell her fortune and she
tells me all that goes on in her master's house. The young man has been
cared for there these five or six days, and they only await the chance
to smuggle him out of the city. Have him seized and secure him in
prison, where he shall rot--for I declare to you, as surely as there are
stars above, these letters of the divine volume in which soothsayers
read, he will be your death in the end unless you are his."

"I would not be contented with that. I want to return him blow f