Yet never, never, never was Silentia Leatherstonepaugh known to break that dreadful silence, even though honored guests spoke to her kindly, and although young Cain Leatherstonepaugh repeatedly reviled her as had she been Abel's wife. One day came an old Spanish monk of whom Leah and Rachel would learn the language of Castile. Silentia gloomed in her dusky corner unseen of the monk, who was left with her an instant alone. A few moments before, moved perhaps by a dawning comprehension of the unspeakable pathos of her fate, young Cain had given her a dagger. When, two minutes after the monk's arrival, Leah and Rachel entered the room, a black sighing mass cowered in a corner of the sofa, while Silentia rose spectre-like in the dimness, the dagger pointed toward her heart. [Illustration: SILENTIA LEATHERSTONEPAUGH.] "Madonna mia!" giggled the monk hysterically when his petticoats were pulled decorously about him and he was set on his feet again, "I thought I should be arrested for murder--_poverino mio_!" Another day came one of the Beelzebub girls--Lady Diavoletta--who wished to coax some of the Leatherstonepaughs to paint her a series of fans with the torments of Dante's Inferno. When the doorbell rang, and while Cain cried "_Chi e?_" at the peephole, Leah, who was just posing for Rachel's barelegged gypsy, hastily pulled a long silk skirt from haughty but unresisting Silentia and hurried it over her own head before Lady Diavoletta was admitted. The heiress of the Beelzebubs tarried but a moment, then took her departure grimly, without hinting a word of her purpose. Said Lady Diavoletta afterward to the Cherubim sisters, "Would you believe it? I called one day upon those Leatherstonepaughs, and they never even apologized for receiving me in a room where there was an insane American just escaped from her keeper, _tray beang arrangee pore doncy le cong cong_!" [Illustration: SILENTIA AS SHE APPEARED TO LADY DIAVOLETTA BEELZEBUB.]