that women give there is always a delicacy which has
something maternal, foreseeing, and complete about it. But when
the words of hope and peace are said with grace of gesture and that
eloquence of tone which comes from the heart, and when, above all, the
benefactress is beautiful, a young man does not resist. The prisoner
breathed in love through all his senses. A rosy tinge colored his white
cheeks; his eyes lost something of the sadness that dulled them, and he
said, in a peculiar tone of voice:--

"You are an angle of goodness--But Labedoyere!" he added. "Oh,
Labedoyere!"

At this cry they all three looked at one another in silence, each
comprehending the others' thoughts. No longer friends of twenty minutes
only, they were friends of twenty years.

"Dear friend," said Servin, "can you save him?"

"I can avenge him."

Ginevra quivered. Though the stranger was handsome, his appearance had
not influenced her; the soft pity in a woman's heart for miseries that
are not ignoble had stifled in Ginevra all other emotions; but to hear
a cry of vengeance, to find in that proscribed being an Italian soul,
devotion to Napoleon, Corsican generosity!--ah! that was, indeed, too
much for her. She looked at the officer with a respectful emotion which
shook his heart. For the first time in her life a man had caused her a
keen emotion. She now, like other women, put the soul of the stranger on
a par with the noble beauty of his features and the happy proportions of
his figure, which she admired as an artist. Led by accidental curiosity
to pity, from pity to a powerful interest, she came, through that
interest, to such profound sensations that she felt she was in danger if
she stayed there longer.

"Until to-morrow, then," she said, giving the officer a gentle smile by
way of a parting consolation.

Seeing that smile, which threw a new light on Ginevra's features, the
stranger forgot all else for an instant.

"To-morrow," he said, sadly; "but to-morrow, Labedoyere--"

Ginevra turned, put a finger on her lips, and looked at him, as if to
say: "Be calm, be prudent."

And the young man cried out in his own language:

"Ah! Dio! che non vorrei vivere dopo averla veduta?--who would not wish
to live after seeing her?"

The peculiar accent with which he pronounced the words made Ginevra
quiver.

"Are you Corsican?" she cried, returning toward him with a beating
heart.

"I was born in Corsica," he replied; "but I was brough