“It's I, Gian Battista. Get up, quick, for Our Lady's sake!” Arthur hurriedly dressed and opened the door. As he stared in perplexity at the coachman's pale, terrified face, the sound of tramping feet and clanking metal came along the corridor, and he suddenly realized the truth. “For me?” he asked coolly. “For you! Oh, signorino, make haste! What have you to hide? See, I can put----” “I have nothing to hide. Do my brothers know?” The first uniform appeared at the turn of the passage. “The signor has been called; all the house is awake. Alas! what a misfortune--what a terrible misfortune! And on Good Friday! Holy Saints, have pity!” Gian Battista burst into tears. Arthur moved a few steps forward and waited for the gendarmes, who came clattering along, followed by a shivering crowd of servants in various impromptu costumes. As the soldiers surrounded Arthur, the master and mistress of the house brought up the rear of this strange procession; he in dressing gown and slippers, she in a long peignoir, with her hair in curlpapers. “There is, sure, another flood toward, and these couples are coming to the ark! Here comes a pair of very strange beasts!” The quotation flashed across Arthur's mind as he looked at the grotesque figures. He checked a laugh with a sense of its jarring incongruity--this was a time for worthier thoughts. “Ave Maria, Regina Coeli!” he whispered, and turned his eyes away, that the bobbing of Julia's curlpapers might not again tempt him to levity. “Kindly explain to me,” said Mr. Burton, approaching the officer of gendarmerie, “what is the meaning of this violent intrusion into a private house? I warn you that, unless you are prepared to furnish me with a satisfactory explanation, I shall feel bound to complain to the English Ambassador.” “I presume,” replied the officer stiffly, “that you will recognize this as a sufficient explanation; the English Ambassador certainly will.” He pulled out a warrant for the arrest of Arthur Burton, student of philosophy, and, handing it to James, added coldly: “If you wish for any further explanation, you had better apply in person to the chief of police.” Julia snatched the paper from her husband, glanced over it, and flew at Arthur like nothing else in the world but a fashionable lady in a rage. “So it's you that have disgraced the family!” she screamed; “setting all the rabble in the town gaping and staring as if the thing were a show? So you have turned jail-bird, now, with all your piety! It's what we might have expected from that Popish woman's child----” “You must not speak to a prisoner in a foreign language, madam,” the officer interrupted; but his remonstrance was hardly audible under the torrent of Julia's vociferous English. “Just what we might have expected! Fasting and prayer and saintly meditation; and this is what was underneath it all! I thought that would be the end of it.”