d, 'Pray believe me quite as anxious as yourself to preserve
these documents.' And the count answered, 'They represent the estates,
and are of legal value, though the amount is small. They represent your
protest, and the admission of your claim. They are priceless.'

In some degree, also, they compensated him for the expense he was put
to in providing for his daughter's subsistence and that of her children.
For there, at all events, visible before his eyes, was the value of the
money, if not the money expended. He remonstrated with Laura for leaving
it more than necessarily exposed. She replied,

'My people know what that money means!' implying, of course, that no one
in her house would consequently touch it. Yet it was reserved for the
count to find it gone.

The discovery was made by the astounded nobleman on the day preceding
Vittoria's appearance at La Scala. His daughter being absent, he had
visited the cupboard merely to satisfy an habitual curiosity. The
cupboard was open, and had evidently been ransacked. He rang up the
domestics, and would have charged them all with having done violence
to the key, but that on reflection he considered this to be a way of
binding faggots together, and he resolved to take them one by one, like
the threading Jesuit that he was, and so get a Judas. Laura's return
saved him from much exercise of his peculiar skill. She, with a cool
'Ebbene!' asked him how long he had expected the money to remain
there. Upon which, enraged, he accused her of devoting the money to the
accursed patriotic cause. And here they came to a curious open division.

'Be content, my father,' she said; 'the money is my husband's, and is
expended on his behalf.'

'You waste it among the people who were the cause of his ruin!' her
father retorted.

'You presume me to have returned it to the Government, possibly?'

'I charge you with tossing it to your so-called patriots.'

'Sir, if I have done that, I have done well.'

'Hear her!' cried the count to the attentive ceiling; and addressing
her with an ironical 'madame,' he begged permission to inquire of her
whether haply she might be the person in the pay of Revolutionists
who was about to appear at La Scala, under the name of the Signorina
Vittoria. 'For you are getting dramatic in your pose, my Laura,' he
added, familiarizing the colder tone of his irony. 'You are beginning to
stand easily in attitudes of defiance to your own father.'

'That I may pract