“All the more reason why I should marry and be happy,” she replied.

This coolness and power of argument increased Piombo’s trouble; the blood rushed violently to his head, and his face turned purple.  Ginevra shuddered; she sprang like a bird on her father’s knee, threw her arms around his neck, and caressed his white hair, exclaiming, tenderly:—­

“Oh, yes, yes, let me die first!  I could never survive you, my father, my kind father!”

“Oh! my Ginevra, my own Ginevra!” replied Piombo, whose anger melted under this caress like snow beneath the rays of the sun.

“It was time you ceased,” said the baroness, in a trembling voice.

“Poor mother!”

“Ah!  Ginevretta! mia bella Ginevra!”

And the father played with his daughter as though she were a child of six.  He amused himself by releasing the waving volume of her hair, by dandling her on his knee; there was something of madness in these expressions of his love.  Presently his daughter scolded while kissing him, and tried, by jesting, to obtain admission for Luigi; but her father, also jesting, refused.  She sulked, then returned to coax once more, and sulked again, until, by the end of the evening, she was forced to be content with having impressed upon her father’s mind both her love for Luigi and the idea of an approaching marriage.

The next day she said no more about her love; she was more caressing to her father than she had ever been, and testified the utmost gratitude, as if to thank him for the consent he seemed to have given by his silence.  That evening she sang and played to him for a long time, exclaiming now and then:  “We want a man’s voice for this nocturne.”  Ginevra was an Italian, and that says all.

At the end of a week her mother signed to her.  She went; and Elisa Piombo whispered in her ear:—­

“I have persuaded your father to receive him.”

“Oh! mother, how happy you have made me!”

That day Ginevra had the joy of coming home on the arm of her Luigi.  The officer came out of his hiding-place for the second time only.  The earnest appeals which Ginevra made to the Duc de Feltre, then minister of war, had been crowned with complete success.  Luigi’s name was replaced upon the roll of officers awaiting orders.  This was the first great step toward better things.  Warned by Ginevra of the difficulties he would encounter with her father, the young man dared not express his fear of finding it impossible to please the old man.  Courageous under adversity, brave on a battlefield, he trembled at the thought of entering Piombo’s salon.  Ginevra felt him tremble, and this emotion, the source of which lay in her, was, to her eyes, another proof of love.

“How pale you are!” she said to him when they reached the door of the house.

“Oh!  Ginevra, if it concerned my life only!—­”

Though Bartolomeo had been notified by his wife of the formal presentation Ginevra was to make of her lover, he would not advance to meet him, but remained seated in his usual arm-chair, and the sternness of his brow was awful.