Since I was your daughter why did I not bear your name when I was a little girl?  You were ashamed to let it be known that you were married, seeing what sort of wife you had taken, and you found yourself in a dilemma.  If you had acknowledged me as your daughter in Austria, your friends in Rome would soon have found out my existence—­and the existence of your wife.  You were very cautious in those days, but you seem to have grown careless of late, or you would not have left those papers in the care of the Countess Spicca, my maid—­and my mother.  I have heard that very bad men soon reach their second childhood and act foolishly.  It is quite true.

“Then, later, when you saw that I loved, and was loved, and was to be happy, you came between my love and me.  You appeared in your own character as a liar, a slanderer and a traitor.  I loved a man who was brave, honourable, faithful—­reckless, perhaps, and wild as such men are—­but devoted and true.  You came between us.  You told me that he was false, cowardly, an adventurer of the worst kind.  Because I would not believe you, and would have married him in spite of you, you killed him.  Was it cowardly of him to face the first swordsman in Europe?  They told me that he was not afraid of you, the men who saw it, and that he fought you like a lion, as he was.  And the provocation, too!  He never struck me.  He was showing me what he meant by a term in fencing—­the silver knife he held grazed my cheek because I was startled and moved.  But you meant to kill him, and you chose to say that he had struck me.  Did you ever hear a harsh word from his lips during those months of waiting?  When you had done your work you fled—­like the murderer you were and are.  But I escaped from the woman who says she is my mother—­and is—­and I went to him and found him living and married him.  You used to tell me that he was an adventurer and little better than a beggar.  Yet he left me a large fortune.  It is as well that he provided for me, since you have succeeded in losing most of your own money at play—­doubtless to insure my not profiting by it at your death.  Not that you will die—­men of your kind outlive their victims, because they kill them.

“And now, when you saw—­for you did see it—­when you saw and knew that Orsino Saracinesca and I loved each other, you have broken my life a second time.  You might so easily have gone to him, or have come to me, at the first, with the truth.  You know that I should never forgive you for what you had done already.  A little more could have made matters no worse then.  You knew that Don Orsino would have thanked you as a friend for the warning.  Instead—­I refuse to believe you in your dotage after all—­you make that woman spy upon me until the great moment is come, you give her the weapons and you bid her strike when the blow will be most excruciating.  You are not a man.  You are Satan.  I parted twice from the man I love.  He would not let me go, and he came back and tried to keep me—­I