"A wooden cross nailed on the castle wall, by tine kind hand of Fra Marraccina, marked the uncouth grave of my brother till 1860, when the ecclesiastical and civic authorities of Pistoja took heart, and, with many grand and empty ceremonies, exhumed his sad remains, and reinterred them in a coffin within the church of the Confraternita dei Dolori, where they now lie, and may they rest in peace![*] [*] For the truth of this story, see the _Athenæum_ of 1860. "Fra Marraccini, now Bishop of Pistoja, performed the funeral mass, and wrote me all about it when I was far away, a merchant seaman, in the Southern Pacific.. The good man sent me his blessing, and it reached me even there." As he concluded, the Italian crossed himself, and stepped aside, as if to light a cigar; but Ethel Basset and others knew, by the tremor of his voice, that he had turned to hide his emotion. "And this cruel colonel--this Austrian," she asked, "what became of him?" "The curse that fell on Cain followed him. He died, not on a gallows, as he deserved, but fell beneath the Danish rifles, at the foot of the Dannewerke," replied Manfredi, with flashing eyes; "and now I am Christian enough to say: may he, too, rest in peace, even as my brother rests at Pistoja." CHAPTER XXII. ZUARES AND THE SHARK. The voyage of the _Hermione_ had now lasted several weeks. During that time Hawkshaw had never ventured to resume the subject which Ethel had so summarily dismissed on that evening in Acton Chase--the evening which had an end so fatal--the subject, of his passion for her, and certainly, as such things grow and mature by propinquity, it was more deeply rooted now than it was then. He was wisely and sedulously attentive during their daily and hourly intercourse in the circumscribed space on shipboard--attentive, but nothing more. Yet Ethel knew well what those delicate attentions inferred, and shrank from them systematically and intuitively, and in such a manner, though quiet and gentle, as to give the persevering ex-captain of Texan troopers not the shadow of a hope for the future. Moreover, he was rather galled to perceive that ever since that evening when Morley Ashton disappeared, Ethel had adopted a nun-like soberness of attire and colour that reminded one of mourning. Save Morley's engagement-ring, she wore no ornament, and Hawkshaw knew that to the black ribbon around her neck was attached a locket, with a braid of Ashton's hair entwined with her own, on one side, and on the other, a miniature of herself, for it was the same locket which he had worn when in Africa, and which she had found lying on his toilet-table on the morning after his mysterious disappearance and supposed death. She knew that he had always borne it next his heart, and now she resolved it should ever be worn next her own; for with such things do lovers solace themselves.