window in her hiding-place?"

At once he wrote a note, the note of a man exiled by his family to
Elba, the note of a degraded marquis now a mere captain of equipment.
Then he made a cord of whatever he could find that was capable of
being turned into string, filled the note with a few silver crowns,
and lowered it in the deepest silence to the centre of that spherical
gleam.

"The shadows will show if her mother or the servant is with her,"
thought Montefiore. "If she is not alone, I can pull up the string at
once."

But, after succeeding with infinite trouble in striking the glass, a
single form, the little figure of Juana, appeared upon the wall. The
young girl opened her window cautiously, saw the note, took it, and
stood before the window while she read it. In it, Montefiore had given
his name and asked for an interview, offering, after the style of the
old romances, his heart and hand to the Signorina Juana di Mancini--a
common trick, the success of which is nearly always certain. At
Juana's age, nobility of soul increases the dangers which surround
youth. A poet of our day has said: "Woman succumbs only to her own
nobility. The lover pretends to doubt the love he inspires at the
moment when he is most beloved; the young girl, confident and proud,
longs to make sacrifices to prove her love, and knows the world and
men too little to continue calm in the midst of her rising emotions
and repel with contempt the man who accepts a life offered in
expiation of a false reproach."

Ever since the constitution of societies the young girl finds herself