The doubts and difficulties which perplexed these two innocent heads from this hour, and led to innumerable discussions and secret conclaves, harassed chiefly by the impression left after each debate, of subtle enmity having been at work, although why and through whose agency, they could not even conjecture. Doña Hermosa told what little she had heard of Hilo’s passion for a French ambassador’s daughter, and so accounted for his wish to break his former engagement; but all the rest remained in the dark. If Viola had received no notice of Hilo’s desire to release himself from a distasteful union, the person or persons who suppressed his letters may have used her name in such a manner as to irritate him into the extraordinary steps he had taken to be rid of an intolerable because obstinate burden, and the same miscreants had doubtless unbarred the shutter to Captain Carlo and assisted that worthy’s escape; but this was all sheer conjecture. Indeed it could not be so, for all were long proved servants except a lad she employed as a page out of respect for the old nurse who had reared her from infancy, and for the few past years had been employed in taking charge of her poor brother with Don Augustino. While such speculations engaged their thoughts, a letter arrived from the knight by a returned caravel, announcing the safe landing of the Spanish army and strait of the French, deserted by the Portuguese, and stating the confession made by Inique on shipboard. Doña Hermosa communicated this strange intelligence to Don Augustino’s daughter, and the two, as might be predicated always of two women in like circumstances, cried over it together, and then discussed the event in all its bearings. Viola also cried a good deal in private, for despite her disavowal of love for Hilo, she found it difficult to convert a lately affianced husband into a brother on such short notice; but in the course of a day or two her reflections took another shape. Was it not better to love him as a brother who indeed would never, she knew now, have been any thing else to her even without this obstacle? But how did she know she still had a living brother; between two such fiery tempers, what collision might not take place through ignorance on the one side and rashness on the other? Oh, she must hasten to interpose, to effect a reconciliation if any misunderstanding existed, to earn some consideration, too, from her brother, by undeceiving him as to her former apparent immodesty; and moreover this mystery, so closely touching her honor, must be probed. She came down to breakfast the third morning with her mind fully made up, and before the meal was over astonished her hostess by soliciting her protection in a voyage to Tercera. At first the countess strongly opposed the design, but in the end, of course, entered into it with her whole heart. What arguments Viola used are not worth recapitulating here; they were not very strong