"There--there--there is the money," said Leonora, taking the vial eagerly; and then she added, speaking to herself, "Now, man, I defy you. I have my safety in my own hands," and, paying the monk the money, she remounted her horse and rode down the hill. The old monk, while he counted the money carefully, gazed after her, muttering to himself, "Now that is for some fair rival, belike, or else for some faithless lover. Mayhap her husband has played her false. Ay, Heaven help us! we have always some good excuse for covering over our real intentions from the eyes of others. To save her honour at the expense of her life! That is a likely tale indeed! We have no Lucretias now-a-days except the pope's daughter, and she is a Lucretia of another sort." Whatever the old man in his hardened nature might think, Leonora d'Orco had no purpose but the one she stated. She had long felt the necessity of the means of self-defence. She had long known that the only dread she ever experienced now, would vanish if she possessed the immediate power of life or death over an assailant or over herself. The dagger she had bought in Florence some weeks after the burning of the Villa Morelli, but she doubted her strength--not her courage--to use it with effect. But when the least wound would prove fatal, the weapon had a higher value. "One scratch upon my arm or upon his hand," she said to herself, "and I am safe from worse than death." It must have been a terrible state of society which led a young girl to contemplate such a resource as a blessing. I cannot venture to give anything like a picture of that state. Suffice it that the fears of Leonora d'Orco were not superfluous, nor her precautions without cause. CHAPTER XXXVIII. I have heard it said that the world is weary of the picturesque in writing, tired of landscape painters, eager only for the tale or for the characters--the pepper and salt of fiction. So be it. But yet there is something in a scene--in the place, in the very spot where any great events are enacted, which gives not only an identity, but a harmony to the narrative of these events. Imola, with its old castle and its sombre walls, now repaired and strengthened by the care of Ramiro d'Orco, lay, like the hard and rugged stone of the peach, in the centre of more sweet and beautiful things.