ered him
to give a message to her father.

"When the count comes home, ask him to see me," she said. Temistocle
bowed once more, and was gone.

Yes, she would see her father, and tell him plainly what she had
suffered from Benoni. She felt that no father, however cruel, would
allow his daughter to be so treated, and she would detail the
conversation to him.

She had not been able to read Nino's letter, for she feared the
servant, knowing the writing to be Italian and legible to him. Now she
hastened to drink in its message of love. You cannot suppose that I
know exactly what he said, but he certainly set forth at some length
his proposal that she should leave her father, and escape with her
lover from the bondage in which she was now held. He told her modestly
of his success, in so far as it was necessary that she should
understand his position. It must have been a very eloquent letter, for
it nearly persuaded her to a step of which she had wildly dreamed,
indeed, but which in her calmer moments she regarded as impossible.

The interminable afternoon was drawing to a close, and once more she
sat by the open window, regardless of the increasing cold. Suddenly it
all came over her,--the tremendous importance of the step she was
about to take, if she should take Nino at his word, and really break
from one life into another. The long restrained tears, that had been
bound from flowing through all Benoni's insults and her own anger,
trickled silently down her cheek, no longer pale, but bright and
flushed at the daring thought of freedom.

At first it seemed far off, as seen in the magician's glass. She
looked and saw herself as another person, acting a part only half
known and half understood. But gradually her own individual soul
entered into the figure of her imagination; her eager heart beat fast;
she breathed and moved and acted in the future. She was descending the
dark steps alone, listening with supernatural sense of sound for her
lover's tread without. It came; the door opened, and she was in his
arms,--in those strong arms that could protect her from insult and
tyranny and cruel wooing; out in the night, on the road, in Rome,
married, free, and made blessed for ever. On a sudden the artificial
imagery of her labouring brain fell away, and the thought crossed her
mind that henceforth she must be an orphan. Her father would never
speak to her again, or ever own for his a daughter that had done such
a deed. Like