“Is it the custom here,” inquired Miss Nevil, with a smile, “for young ladies to wear such little instruments as these in their bodices?”

“It is,” answered Colomba, with a sigh.  “There are so many wicked people about!”

“And would you really have the courage to strike with it, like this?” And Miss Nevil, dagger in hand, made a gesture of stabbing from above, as actors do on the stage.

“Yes,” said Colomba, in her soft, musical voice, “if I had to do it to protect myself or my friends.  But you must not hold it like that, you might wound yourself if the person you were going to stab were to draw back.”  Then, sitting up in bed, “See,” she added, “you must strike like this—­upward!  If you do so, the thrust is sure to kill, they say.  Happy are they who never need such weapons.”

She sighed, dropped her head back on the pillow, and closed her eyes.  A more noble, beautiful, virginal head it would be impossible to imagine.  Phidias would have asked no other model for Minerva.

CHAPTER VI

It is in obedience to the precept of Horace that I have begun by plunging in media res.  Now that every one is asleep—­the beautiful Colomba, the colonel, and his daughter—­I will seize the opportunity to acquaint my reader with certain details of which he must not be ignorant, if he desires to follow the further course of this veracious history.  He is already aware that Colonel della Rebbia, Orso’s father, had been assassinated.  Now, in Corsica, people are not murdered, as they are in France, by the first escaped convict who can devise no better means of relieving a man of his silver-plate.  In Corsica a man is murdered by his enemies—­but the reason he has enemies is often very difficult to discover.  Many families hate each other because it has been an old-standing habit of theirs to hate each other; but the tradition of the original cause of their hatred may have completely disappeared.

The family to which Colonel della Rebbia belonged hated several other families, but that of the Barricini particularly.  Some people asserted that in the sixteenth century a della Rebbia had seduced a lady of the Barricini family, and had afterward been poniarded by a relative of the outraged damsel.  Others, indeed, told the story in a different fashion, declaring that it was a della Rebbia who had been seduced, and a Barricini who had been poniarded.  However that may be, there was, to use the time-honoured expression, “blood between the two houses.”  Nevertheless, and contrary to custom, this murder had not resulted in others; for the della Rebbia and the Barricini had been equally persecuted by the Genoese Government, and as the young men had all left the country, the two families were deprived, during several generations, of their more energetic representatives.  At the close of the last century, one of the della Rebbias, an officer in the Neapolitan service, quarrelled,