"Non--Ving-and-Ving. Ithuel answered for us, and you may be sure he can
speak his own tongue. Ving-and-Ving is the word, and he pronounces it
as I do."

"Ving-y-Ving!" repeated Ghita, in her pretty Italian tones, dropping
naturally into the vice-governatore's fault of pronunciation--"it is an
odd name, and I like it less than Feu-Follet."

"I wish, dearest Ghita, I could persuade you to like the name of Yvard,"
rejoined the young man, in a half-reproachful, half-tender manner, "and
I should care nothing for any other. You accuse me of disrespect for
priests; but no son could ever kneel to a father for his blessing, half
so readily or half so devoutly, as I could kneel with thee before any
friar in Italy, to receive that nuptial benediction which I have so
often asked at your hand, but which you have so constantly and so
cruelly refused."

"I am afraid the name would not then be Feu-Follet, but Ghita-Folie,"
said the girl, laughing, though she felt a bitter pang at the heart,
that cost her an effort to control; "no more of this now, Raoul; we may
be observed and watched; it is necessary that we separate."

A hurried conversation, of more interest to the young couple themselves
than it would prove to the reader, though it might not have been wholly
without the latter, but which it would be premature to relate, now
followed, when Ghita left Raoul on the hill, insisting that she knew the
town too well to have any apprehensions about threading its narrow and
steep streets, at any hour, by herself. This much, in sooth, must be
said in favor of Andrea Barrofaldi's administration of justice; he had
made it safe for the gentle, the feeble, and the poor, equally, to move