The apprentice sleeping in the shop, the cook bivouacking in the
kitchen, Perez and his wife sleeping, no doubt, the wakeful sleep of
the aged, the echoing sonority of the old mansion, the close
surveillance of the girl in the day-time,--all these things were
obstacles, and made success a thing well-nigh impossible. But
Montefiore had in his favor against all impossibilities the blood of
the Maranas which gushed in the heart of that inquisitive girl,
Italian by birth, Spanish in principles, virgin indeed, but impatient
to love. Passion, the girl, and Montefiore were ready and able to defy
the whole universe.

Montefiore, impelled as much by the instinct of a man of gallantry as
by those vague hopes which cannot be explained, and to which we give
the name of presentiments (a word of astonishing verbal accuracy),
Montefiore spent the first hours of the night at his window,
endeavoring to look below him to the secret apartment where,
undoubtedly, the merchant and his wife had hidden the love and
joyfulness of their old age. The ware-room of the "entresol" separated
him from the rooms on the ground-floor. The captain therefore could
not have recourse to noises significantly made from one floor to the
other, an artificial language which all lovers know well how to
create. But chance, or it may have been the young girl herself, came
to his assistance. At the moment when he stationed himself at his
window, he saw, on the black wall of the courtyard, a circle of light,
in the centre of which the silhouette of Juana was clearly defined;
the consecutive movement of the arms, and the attitude, gave evidence
that she was arranging her hair for the night.

"Is she alone?" Montefiore asked himself; "could I, without danger,
lower a letter filled with coin and strike it against that circular