"Nothing could be more natural," replied the young man, on whose face
Piombo's flaming eyes now rested. "Nina was my sister."

"Are you Luigi Porta?" asked the old man.

"Yes."

Bartolomeo rose, tottered, was forced to lean against a chair and
beckon to his wife. Elisa Piombo came to him. Then the two old people,
silently, each supporting the other, left the room, abandoning their
daughter with a sort of horror.

Luigi Porta, bewildered, looked at Ginevra, who had turned as white as
a marble statue, and stood gazing at the door through which her father
and mother had disappeared. This departure and this silence seemed to
her so solemn that, for the first time, in her whole life, a feeling
of fear entered her soul. She struck her hands together with great
force, and said, in a voice so shaken that none but a lover could have
heard the words:--

"What misery in a word!"

"In the name of our love, what have I said?" asked Luigi Porta.

"My father," she replied, "never spoke to me of our deplorable
history, and I was too young when we left Corsica to know anything
about it."

"Are we in vendetta?" asked Luigi, trembling.