CONTENTS.
THE CORSICAN LOVERS.
CHAPTER I.
BROTHERLY LOVE.
“You have no right, Pascal, to command me to marry a man whom I do not love.”
The speaker was a young girl not more than eighteen years of age. As she spoke, the flashing of her eyes and her clenched hands betokened the intensity of her feelings.
The person to whom the words were addressed was a man of about forty. He was smooth-shaven, and the black, shaggy eyebrows which met above the bridge of his nose, gave to his face a stern and almost forbidding expression. He did not reply to his sister’s impassioned words for some time, but sat, apparently unconcerned, tapping lightly on the library table with the fingers of his right hand.
At last he spoke: “I do not command you, Vivienne; all I ask is that you will comply with your father’s dying wish.”
“How do you know that it was his dying wish? He was dead when found, stabbed to the heart, as you told me, by Manuel Della Coscia—that brave Corsican who ran away to escape the vengeance he so well deserved.”