"But you, yourself? You never saw her?"
"The Signora Alieni goes always veiled."
"Are there none—out there—who know her?"
"Old friends ten years ago in Naples. And the laborers of Nicola."
"When they come, they will know at once she is not here," said Christina, with an odd, proud calm. "Ah, please, let me see what they are about!" And she persistently advanced to a window and peered between the slats of a blind.
Blackness was lifting from the earth. That clear gray light, clearer and grimmer than ever they had seen it, of the slowly rising dawn had begun to fill the open spaces. Under the trees it was still a dusk of living shadows, and, from within the house, the half-muffled, surrounding pressure strained closer still against the walls. Christina faced round, uttered a piercing shriek and pointed toward the panel. To this, the men who watched her turned. And on the instant, the shutters clicking as she flung them open, the girl flashed through and ran straight into the dawn on the white terrace. "You who know Allegra Alieni, am I she? Am I she?"
A wail of amazement and denial greeted her. The men within, the men without, came to a standstill.—"If you ever loved me," said Christina to Herrick, "keep back from me, now!" He replied only by swinging forward Gumama, who thereupon stood in the sight of his friends with the mute argument of a revolver at his head. Not a voice replied. But not a shot was fired.
In the pause produced by the concerned and puzzled hesitation of the besiegers, Christina gathered up her voice. She was used to send it far, to hush and rouse with it, to pierce and move at will, and neither misery nor fatigue seemed now to have weakened its flexible and winning melody. "Sirs," cried the girl, "I ask you the one thing. Are you not here as the executioners of the great Camorra? Do you, then, wish to disobey?"
She had centered upon herself a bewildered stare.
"And do you not disobey if you blunder? Do you wish to bring all the new world about your ears for the wrong thing? Believe me, we four, we are strong persons in that world—we do not fall unavenged! If we are to die here, now, and the great society of the Camorra is to wreck itself upon our death, let it not be in a mistake!—Ah, you see! Believe me! We are not false brethren of yours, we are Americans, every one! But in a way you and I are brethren, for I, like you, have seen my heart's good faith betrayed—and by the same hand!"