‘Her hair!’ exclaimed the Chevalier, in horror.  ’The miserable girl to have fallen so low!  Is it with you, fellow?’

’Surely, Illustrissimo.  Such tresses—­so shining, so silky, so well kept,—­I reserved to adorn the heads of Signor Renato’s most princely customers’, said the man, unpacking from the inmost recesses of one of his most ingeniously arranged packages, a parcel which contained the rich mass of beautiful black tresses.  ’Ah! her head looked so noble,’ he added, ’that I felt it profane to let my scissors touch those locks; but she said that she could never wear them openly more, and that they did but take up her time, and were useless to her child and her father—­as she called him; and she much needed the medicaments for the old man that I gave her in exchange.’

‘Heavens!  A daughter of Ribaumont!’ sighed the Chevalier, clenching his hand.  ’And now, man, let me see the jewels with which the besotted child parted.’

The jewels were not many, nor remarkable.  No one but a member of the family would have identified them, and not one of the pearls was there; and the Chevalier refrained from inquiring after them, lest, by putting the Italian on the scent of anything so exceptionally valuable, he should defeat his own object, and lead to the man’s securing the pearls and running away with them.  But Ercole understood his glance, with the quickness of a man whose trade forced him to read countenances.  ’The Eccellenza is looking for the pearls of Ribaumont?  The lady made no offer of them to me.’

‘Do you believe that she has them still?’

’I am certain of it, sir.  I know that she has jewels—­though she said not what they were—­which she preserved at the expense of her hair.  It was thus.  The old man had, it seems, been for weeks on the rack with pains caught by a chill when they fled from La Sablerie, and, though the fever had left him, he was still so stiff in the joints as to be unable to move.  I prescribed for him unguents of balm and Indian spice, which, as the Eccellenza knows, are worth far more than their weight in gold; nor did these jewels make up the cost of these, together with the warm cloak for him, and the linen for her child that she had been purchasing.  I tell you, sir, the babe must have no linen but the finest fabric of Cambrai—­yes, and even carnation-coloured ribbons—­though, for herself, I saw the homespun she was sewing.  As she mused over what she could throw back, I asked if she had no other gauds to make up the price, and she said, almost within herself, “They are my child’s, not mine.”  Then remembering that I had been buying the hair of the peasant maidens, she suddenly offered me her tresses.  But I could yet secure the pearls, if Eccellenza would.’

‘Do you then believe her to be in any positive want or distress?’ said the Chevalier.

’Signor, no.  The heretical households among whom she travels gladly support the families of their teachers, and at Catholic inns they pay their way.  I understood them to be on their way to a synod of Satan at the nest of heretics, Montauban, where doubtless the old miscreant would obtain an appointment to some village.’