"Wait! A moment! No, what I know it is far from Christina. It happened before she was born. But I will tell it. You shall judge."
A long painful breath labored from her bosom. Then she spoke.
"The scandal was this. My father died in prison. He was imprisoned for his life. He was accused that he had killed a child."
"Yes. Well, go on."
"It begins long before, with my home in Germany. My father was a merchant of wines there, and he had in business relations with a Neapolitan family named Gabrielli. Their son, Emile, was my brother's friend.——Emile Gabrielli, Herrick's Italian lawyer, who had suggested his novel!"
"I had but the one brother; for my mother was never strong and of her children only two grew up. We were very old fashioned; we lived in comfort but we had neither the new thoughts nor the new manners. Only my brother was very advanced. He was so modern that when he looked upon us, even, it gave him exasperation. His friend was not of his faith. But that was so old-fashioned a thought it could not be at all mentioned before him. Well, then, I—too—for one thing perhaps we are all enough advanced! I came to love Emile. He loved me, too. And no one was pleased—not even my brother! But, after a long time, when they began to think I, too, was falling ill like all the rest who died, we were betrothed. And my father sold his business out and bought a vineyard in Sicily, near to the estate of Emile's father, taking there my mother, whose health failed." Yes, with the bewildered indifference of his own emotion, Herrick remembered the miniature of which the parents of that sentimental gentleman had not been able to deprive him and recognized the changed original in Henrietta Deutch.
"And one morning, walking far before breakfast, my father came upon a dead little boy under a bush among some rocks. He brought it to our home in his arms; it was the baby of a poor farmer. It had been stabbed between the little shoulders. And there was a strange, three-cornered wound."
She stopped and her hands stirred in her lap. But she clasped them and went on. "My father was accused. Witnesses appeared against him with strange tales. How could we make ourselves believed. I have told you how he fared.
"Do you think my brother could rest? He left his law in Germany; he came to Sicily to fight, to hunt, to turn every stone. He was found like the child. There was the same three-cornered mark."
Kane gave a low whistle.