“I ask you to spare me, signore,” the girl said, in a low and trembling voice.

“Oh, I am not now going to scold you, my dear young lady.  I intended to have done so.  I intended to have shown you that you were wrong, and exceedingly ungrateful, and that you ought to ask pardon of my friend Calabressa.  However, it is all changed.  You need not fear him any more; you need not turn away from him.  Your father is pardoned, and free!”

She looked up, uncertain, as if she had not heard aright.

“I repeat:  your father is pardoned, and free.  You shall learn how and why afterward.  Meanwhile you have nothing before you, as I take it, but to reap the reward of your bravery.”

She did not hear this last sentence.  She had turned quickly to her mother.

“Mother, do you hear?” she said in a whisper.

“Yes, yes, child:  thank God!”

“Now, you see, my dear young lady,” Von Zoesch continued, “it is not a scolding, but good news I have given you; and nothing remains but that you should bid us good-bye, and say you are not sorry you appealed to us when you were in trouble, according to the advice of your good friend Calabressa.  See, I have brought here with me a gentleman whom you know, and who will see you safe back to Naples, and to England; and another, his companion, who is also, I understand, an old friend of yours:  you will have a pleasant party.  Your father will be sent to join in a good cause, where he may retrieve his name if he chooses; you and your friends go back to England.  So I may say that all your wishes are gratified at last, and we have nothing now but to say good-bye!”

The girl had been glancing timidly and nervously at the figures grouped round the table, and her breast was heaving.  She rose; perhaps it was to enable herself to speak more freely; perhaps it was only out of deference to those seated there.

“No,” she said, in a low voice, but it was heard clearly enough in the silence.  “I—­I would say a word to you—­whom I may not see again.  Yes, I thank you—­from my heart; you have taken a great trouble away from my life.  I—­I thank you; but there is something I would say.”

She paused for a second.  She was very pale.  She seemed to be nerving herself for some effort; and, strangely enough, her mother’s hand, unseen, was stretched up to her, and she clasped it and held it tight.  It gave her courage.

“It is true, I am only a girl; you are my elders, and you are men; but I have known good and brave men who were not ashamed to listen to what a woman thought was right; and it is as a woman that I speak to you,” she said; and her voice, low and timid as it was, had a strange, pathetic vibration in it, that went to the heart.  “I have suffered much of late.  I hope no other woman will ever suffer in the same way.”

Again she hesitated, but for the last time.