[*] For the truth of this story, see the Athenæum of 1860.
"Fra Marraccini, now Bishop of Pistoja, performed the funeral mass, and wrote me all about it when I was far away, a merchant seaman, in the Southern Pacific.. The good man sent me his blessing, and it reached me even there."
As he concluded, the Italian crossed himself, and stepped aside, as if to light a cigar; but Ethel Basset and others knew, by the tremor of his voice, that he had turned to hide his emotion.
"And this cruel colonel—this Austrian," she asked, "what became of him?"
"The curse that fell on Cain followed him. He died, not on a gallows, as he deserved, but fell beneath the Danish rifles, at the foot of the Dannewerke," replied Manfredi, with flashing eyes; "and now I am Christian enough to say: may he, too, rest in peace, even as my brother rests at Pistoja."
CHAPTER XXII.
ZUARES AND THE SHARK.
The voyage of the Hermione had now lasted several weeks.
During that time Hawkshaw had never ventured to resume the subject which Ethel had so summarily dismissed on that evening in Acton Chase—the evening which had an end so fatal—the subject, of his passion for her, and certainly, as such things grow and mature by propinquity, it was more deeply rooted now than it was then.
He was wisely and sedulously attentive during their daily and hourly intercourse in the circumscribed space on shipboard—attentive, but nothing more.