iest, who had watched the signing, looked at her in some surprise.

'Are you married or unmarried?' he asked quietly.

'Unmarried,' answered Pina in her hard voice, and she turned away.

For Landi was a patrician name; and though Jews, when baptized, usually
took the surname of the noble under whose auspices they were converted,
it was quite clear that Pina was not of Semitic race.

Stradella had taken Ortensia's hand and kissed it when the little
ceremony was over, but that was all, and neither could find words to
speak. Pina took off the beautiful veil, folded it on the polished
table, and rolled it up to carry away, for the Mother Superior wished
Ortensia to keep it. Then the serving-woman produced the two brown
cloaks in which she and her mistress had fled from Venice, and they put
them on, and all left the church together after thanking the priest; and
Stradella gave the sacristan two silver Apostolic florins, which was the
largest fee the fellow had ever received in his life.

When they were all in the street, the Bravi took off their hats and
asked to be introduced to the bride, and Stradella presented them with
some ceremony, greatly to the surprise and delight of some ragged
children who had collected round the church steps; for Ortensia made a
court courtesy, and the Bravi bowed to the ground, sweeping the
cobble-stones with their plumes and sticking up their rapiers behind
them almost perpendicularly in the air.

'Count Trombin, Count Gambardella,' said the musician to his wife,
introducing the pair. 'These gentlemen have liberated us from our
respective prisons and have been kindly instrumental in bringing about
our marriage.'

'We owe you both a debt of undying gratitude, gentlemen,' said Ortensia,
blushing a little under her brown hood.

'It is an honour to have served your ladyship,' Trombin replied, with
another grand bow.

Ortensia slipped her arm through Stradella's and pressed his
surreptitiously against her side, as if to say that she would never let
him go out of her sight again; and she wished, as she had never wished
for anything in her life, that she were alone with him already, to throw
her arms round his neck and tell him the very things he was longing to
tell her.

Behind them the Bravi walked in silence, their hands on the hilts of
their rapiers and their eyes fixed on the happy pair, each absorbed in
his own reflections.

Trombin thought, in the first place, that Ortensia was on