"A tyrant, said you? Call him monster, fiend, or what you will: the flaming depths of hell contain not a darker spirit, a more designing devil! You offer me life: yet what is life to me now, when every flower that adorned my path in youth has been crushed and blighted, and every beam of joy extinguished, till gloom, horror, and revenge have settled like a shadow on my soul? O, signor! words cannot depict the bodily and spiritual agony I have endured. Ere we go, hear me, but a moment! My story is short, but bitter. Hear it, and pity me!" *CHAPTER XXIII.* *THE SECOND PENITENT—THE CAVALIER.* I am the Cavaliere Paolo, of Casteluccio, one of the fairest patrimonies in Naples. No young man entered life with brighter prospects than mine, when, at the age of twenty, I found myself master of a handsome fortune and the love of Laura Molina, my fair cousin. I had been betrothed to her in infancy by my father; who, as her guardian, wished to keep her ducats in the family. When at college, the idea of being compelled to marry my little cousin was a source of continual vexation to me; and from very obstinacy made me prone to fall in love with every other girl. My marriage seemed the commencement of something terrible, and I saw with dismay the arrival of my twentieth birthday; when throwing aside gown and tocque, and after spending a year amid the gaieties of Florence and Naples, I should have to demand my bride at the convent where she boarded. "Per Baccho!" thought I; "if this repugnance is mutual, what a happy couple we shall be!" On reaching the convent of St. Sabina, I found the inmates were hearing mass performed by Father Petronio, the great ecclesiastical orator of Cosenza. I entered the chapel in no pleasant mood, conning over the compliments which courtesy required should be paid to Laura; who I had been informed was the prettiest girl in a convent which was famous for its fashionable beauties. "Ah! if Laura is like thee, young girl, what a happy rogue wilt thou be, Signor Paolo!" thought I, as the veil of a young lady (who occupied a stool near a column against which I leaned) was blown aside, revealing to me a face of such mild and perfect beauty that I became quite bewitched, and wished my unlucky cousin in the crater of Etna. Her complexion was extremely fair; her eyes blue and tender, and a quantity of light-brown hair fell curling around a face which had all that softness and bloom of feature one might imagine in a seraph. Enough! for the time, she banished all thoughts of Laura. At last Father Petronio made an end of his discourse, of which I had not heard a syllable. The people dispersed, and in the crowd of nuns, novices, and boarders, I lost sight of my fair unknown. I turned away with a sigh to visit this provoking cousin, whom I was bound, by my father’s will, to espouse, or my ducats would every one be forfeited to the altar of Madonna.