"So you honor me with a captaincy of brigands," sneered Balsamo.
"I do not know about that, but I noticed secret signs and peculiar words."
"But," replied the other, losing color, "you will never tell them; never to a living soul? You will bury them in the remotest place in your memory so that they shall die there, smothered."
"Just the other way," retorted Lorenza, delighted as angry persons are at having found the antagonist's vulnerable point. "My memory shall piously preserve those words, which I will repeat over and over again when alone, and say aloud when the opening comes, as already I have done."
"To whom?"
"To the princess royal."
"Lorenza, mind this well," said he, clenching his nails in his flesh to subdue his fury and check his rushing blood at the thought that his brothers were in danger through the woman whom he had selected to aid them all, "if you said them, never again will you do so. For the doors will be kept fastened, those bars pointed at the head, and those walls reared as high as Babel's."
"I have already told you, Balsamo, that any soul wherein the love of liberty is reinforced by the hate of tyranny must escape from all prison houses."
"Well and good; try it, woman; but mark this well: you will only twice try it. For the first time I will punish you so severely that you will weep all the tears in your body; and for the second I will strike you pitilessly that you will pour forth all the blood in your veins."