perchance, too, it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards
his son. I would fain feel nothing towards you save respect and
deference; but I pray you to observe, signor, that there is one
subject on which we must not speak. You know not the Signora
Beatrice. You cannot, therefore, estimate the wrong--the
blasphemy, I may even say--that is offered to her character by a
light or injurious word."

"Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!" answered the professor, with a calm
expression of pity, "I know this wretched girl far better than
yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner
Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter; yes, poisonous as she is
beautiful. Listen; for, even should you do violence to my gray
hairs, it shall not silence me. That old fable of the Indian
woman has become a truth by the deep and deadly science of
Rappaccini and in the person of the lovely Beatrice."

Giovanni groaned and hid his face

"Her father," continued Baglioni, "was not restrained by natural
affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as
the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him
justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own
heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a
doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment.
Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful
still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science
before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing."

"It is a dream," muttered Giovanni to himself; "surely it is a