I have said Doña Viola was no fool, and here I intend bringing forward proof of my position. No one would have supposed any thing like nerve existed in so delicate a creature, unless they had seen her descending the stairs with a light in one hand, and a great sword, too stiff for her to draw, in the other, to rally the servants, while that timid old soul, her duenna, was creeping under the bed above as fast as a sudden weakness in her ancient knees would allow. The girl was brimfull of character, and made a worse impression on her first appearance, because fevered and crushed in spirit by the final wickedness of her betrothed husband, and its likely consequences; possibly the fever which afterward brought her to death’s door, had begun to show itself already in unnatural excitement of the brain, for it is not easy otherwise to reconcile the crazy eagerness she showed with her usual modesty. But this is straying from the truffle-eating captain. Poor, simple, lamb-like captain! what could have induced him to pull off his leathern doublet and mask under the eyes of a girl not out of her teens, to be sure, but whose Gallician blood was all afire while watching from a dark window what was passing beneath. I am filled with pity and admiration for Doña Viola, when I think how, with one protector leagues away in Portugal, and the other up stairs, making her toilette to appear becoming in the eyes of this prince who had come to their rescue, she traversed the whole house, accompanied by a desperado whose only restraint lay in the greatness of his hopes dependent in part on present good conduct. She was a little fluttered, and ready to faint with fear, as any other woman short of a novel heroine would have been, but for all that she spoke so connectedly, and showed such faith in the captain’s will and ability to protect her, that it never entered his slow, Netherlandish brain, the figure before him was possessed of no more vitality in itself than an electro-magnetized body, or that she had noticed without start or scream his left, jetty whisker slip down far enough to expose the scrubby red growth underneath. Still less did it occur to him as a remote possibility, the idea of taking him, Captain Wolfang Carlo, fairly in the trap, could be occupying her head at the very moment he talked of “his dear friend, Don Augustino, her father;” and when one servant went up with the tray, a second went out with a summons to the Hermandad.