We had paused more than once upon our journey, and he was in all respects trimmed and dressed as became a gentleman. As he sat there with his face alight and his whole manner animated, there was no trace of the jail-bird period about him. I remembered the man I had first seen at Pollia--the man with the colorless face, the sunken eyes, the matted hair and beard--and was puzzled to identify him with the polished gentleman who sat before me. And yet, in spite of the disguise, the jail-bird was back again in as little time as it would take to snap your thumb and finger. The cloud lowered upon him in a second, and he sat biting his nails with an air altogether lost and furtive. I think his daughter first read the change in him from my own look, for after one swift glance at me she bent over him and gazed into his face. He seemed unconscious of her presence or of ours. “You were saying, dear--” she said, and there halted. He looked up with an undecided half-return to his former brightness. “I was saying--” he began, and then stopped, as if searching in his own mind for the clew to what had passed a moment earlier. “You were thanking Captain Fyffe and Mr. Brunow.” “Gentlemen,” said the count, with a complete momentary repossession of himself, “I know not how to thank you. You have seen enough already to know that the life I have led this many year's has left its mark upon me. I fail in words--sometimes, to tell you the whole truth, I fail in feelings. There are moments when I have not even the heart to be glad that I am free again. But you will understand, and you will forgive because you understand. If words of gratitude do not come easily to my tongue, it is not because you have not deserved them.” “The man who really deserves the thanks of all of us,” I answered, “is Corporal Hinge. Without him we should have been nonplussed; with him everything fell out in the simplest way. We have encountered no difficulty, and run no dangers.” “But,” said Brunow, in his lightest and airiest fashion, as if he disclaimed credit in the very act of claiming it, “I need hardly tell Miss Rossano that in fulfilling the commission we accepted at her hands we should have been delighted to encounter either. As it was we had the most extraordinary good-fortune in the world. The whole thing has been a chapter of happy accidents.” “It pleases you to say so,” said the count; “but my daughter and I enjoy no less the privilege of gratitude.” The position was embarrassing; for the more I thought about it the more I saw how little we had done, and how plain and simple a piece of duty it had been to do that little. “Your father is tired, Miss Rossano,” I said, taking the shortest way out of the difficulty. “You and he, besides, will have a thousand things to say to each other with which nobody else will have a right to interfere.” I rose and held out my hand, and she came from behind her father's chair to meet me with an exquisite frankness.