Mario, without replying, questioned the leader of the squad in whose custody she was. "Can you tell me," he said, "whether you propose simply to imprison her for the night as a vagrant, or whether you have arrested her on suspicion of some crime or misdemeanor?" He was informed that she was accused of a misdemeanor. The physician who had treated Mario with such ill success, irritated to find that he had been cured by an adventuress, accused her of breathing upon her patients, in terms which were equivalent in those days to a charge of unlawfully practising medicine, which charge was likely to have far more serious consequences then than in our day, since the question of witchcraft could always be raised, a crime which the most learned magistrates took seriously and punished with death. "Whatever may happen to her," said Mario to himself, "it is most important that this dangerous girl should lose track of Lauriane, whom perhaps she has already discovered." On the following morning he hurried to the convent. "Now," he said to his friend, "we may breathe freely, but we cannot go to sleep over the volcano." And he told the whole of his strange adventure with the gypsy. Lauriane listened attentively. "Now," she said, "I understand everything. Let me tell you, Mario, why I was so deeply moved when I saw you yesterday, and why I had the assurance to speak to you without being certain that I recognized you. Also, why I hesitated the first time, thinking that I was deceived by my imagination. A week ago, I received an anonymous letter full of insults and threats, in which I was told that you had been killed in the battle of the Pas de Suse. I was overwhelmed by that news. I wept for you, Mario, as one weeps for a brother, and I wrote a letter to your father and sent it instantly to the mail carrier. Little by little, however, reflection led me to doubt the truth of the suspicious intelligence I had received, and when I met you I was on my way to the town, to ascertain, if possible, the names of the nobles who were killed in that battle. I had resolved, if yours was among them, to go to your father and try to sustain him and care for him in that terrible trial. I surely owed him that, did I not, Mario, for all his kindness to me in years gone by?" Mario gazed at Lauriane; he could not tire of contemplating her altered features, her eyes inflamed by grief and tears, the traces of which seemed very fresh. "Ah! my Lauriane," he cried, kissing her hands, "so you have retained a little affection for me?" "Affection and esteem," she replied; "I knew that you had refused to fight against the Protestants." "Ah! I will never do that! and yet I never told my principal reason! I can tell it to you now: I would not run the risk of firing upon your father and your friends. Lauriane, I always loved you dearly; why were your letters to my father always so cold with respect to me?"