It was nine o’clock; the merchant and his wife were reading their evening prayers; suddenly the noise of a carriage drawn by several horses resounded in the street; loud and hasty raps echoed from the shop where the servant hurried to open the door, and into that venerable salon rushed a woman, magnificently dressed in spite of the mud upon the wheels of her travelling-carriage, which had just crossed Italy, France, and Spain.  It was, of course, the Marana,—­the Marana who, in spite of her thirty-six years, was still in all the glory of her ravishing beauty; the Marana who, being at that time the mistress of a king, had left Naples, the fetes, the skies of Naples, the climax of her life of luxury, on hearing from her royal lover of the events in Spain and the siege of Tarragona.

“Tarragona!  I must get to Tarragona before the town is taken!” she cried.  “Ten days to reach Tarragona!”

Then without caring for crown or court, she arrived in Tarragona, furnished with an almost imperial safe-conduct; furnished too with gold which enabled her to cross France with the velocity of a rocket.

“My daughter! my daughter!” cried the Marana.

At this voice, and the abrupt invasion of their solitude, the prayer-book fell from the hands of the old couple.

“She is there,” replied the merchant, calmly, after a pause during which he recovered from the emotion caused by the abrupt entrance, and the look and voice of the mother.  “She is there,” he repeated, pointing to the door of the little chamber.

“Yes, but has any harm come to her; is she still—­”

“Perfectly well,” said Dona Lagounia.

“O God! send me to hell if it so pleases thee!” cried the Marana, dropping, exhausted and half dead, into a chair.

The flush in her cheeks, due to anxiety, paled suddenly; she had strength to endure suffering, but none to bear this joy.  Joy was more violent in her soul than suffering, for it contained the echoes of her pain and the agonies of its own emotion.

“But,” she said, “how have you kept her safe?  Tarragona is taken.”

“Yes,” said Perez, “but since you see me living why do you ask that question?  Should I not have died before harm could have come to Juana?”

At that answer, the Marana seized the calloused hand of the old man, and kissed it, wetting it with the tears that flowed from her eyes —­she who never wept! those tears were all she had most precious under heaven.

“My good Perez!” she said at last.  “But have you had no soldiers quartered in your house?”

“Only one,” replied the Spaniard.  “Fortunately for us the most loyal of men; a Spaniard by birth, but now an Italian who hates Bonaparte; a married man.  He is ill, and gets up late and goes to bed early.”

“An Italian!  What is his name?”

“Montefiore.”

“Can it be the Marquis de Montefiore—­”

“Yes, Senora, he himself.”