“What will the prefect say? Above all, what will my father say?”
“The prefect? You can tell him to mind his own business! Your father? I should have thought, from the way you and Orso were talking, that you had something to say to your father.”
Miss Nevil squeezed her arm, and answered nothing.
“Doesn’t my brother deserve to be loved?” whispered Colomba in her ear. “Don’t you love him a little?”
“Oh, Colomba!” answered Miss Nevil, smiling in spite of her blushes, “you’ve betrayed me! And I trusted you so!”
Colomba slipped her arm round her, and kissed her forehead.
“Little sister,” she whispered very low, “will you forgive me?”
“Why, I suppose I must, my masterful sister,” answered Lydia, as she kissed her back.
The prefect and the public prosecutor were staying with the deputy-mayor, and the colonel, who was very uneasy about his daughter, was paying them his twentieth call, to ask if they had heard of her, when a rifleman, whom the sergeant had sent on in advance, arrived with the full story of the great fight with the brigands—a fight in which nobody had been either killed or wounded, but which had resulted in the capture of a cooking-pot, a pilone, and two girls, whom the man described as the mistresses, or the spies, of the two bandits.
Thus heralded, the two prisoners appeared, surrounded by their armed escort.