"I guess he has--just time. The languishing Iona hurried for once. Well, I don't care!" Aurora folded the paper tight and flung it from her. "Enemies may do what they please; I've got friends. If everything comes out as it really happened, I haven't anything to fear, except that it's mighty unpleasant. It's only lies, and people believing them, that could do me harm. I've got friends in Florence. Oh, not many true ones, I don't suppose. It's paying my way that has made me popular, I'm not such a gump as not to know that. But some true friends I've got, and their backing will be my stay. One friend I've got--" Pride and a sudden battle-light flashed in Aurora's eye. "One friend I've got, who if I gave the word would kill Charlie Hunt for this, or put him in a fair way to dying. I do believe, Hat, that Gerald Fane would call Charlie Hunt out to fight a duel to punish him for a slur on me. Oh, he can fence just as well as the Italians he was brought up with. I've seen the fencing-swords in his studio. But"--she calmed down--"I wouldn't permit that sort of thing. It's ridiculous. I don't believe in it." Cooling to normal, she laughed, with a return to the light of reality. "He doesn't believe in it, either, I shouldn't suppose." CHAPTER XXII Leslie, arriving early next day, read off the newspaper article, making a free translation of it, as follows: * * * * * When a thing is too successful, it is seldom natural; and so when there appeared in our city a _signora_, blond of hair, azure of eye, with the complexion of delicate, luminous roses, red and white, whose name was at once Aurora and _Albaspina_,--Hawthorne,--floral counterpart of dawn, we should have had suspicions. That we had none does not prevent our feeling no very great surprise when we learn that the bearer of the poetic and more than appropriate name is called in sober truth Elena Barton. The more beautiful name was adopted by a child acting out its fairy-stories; it was remembered and re-adopted by a woman when she wished to detach her life from a past which neither charity, fidelity, nor devotion to a sacred duty had succeeded in keeping from sorrow and the deadly aspersions of malignity.