Flavio had been well known some two years previously as one of those bandits who was the terror of a whole province. He was accused of several daring crimes, and a few months before these events a person had been murdered in one of the narrow streets which skirt the city, and the strongest circumstantial evidence pointed him out as the criminal. Since then the police had been vigorously on the alert to discover his hiding-place, but all their efforts up to this period had been fruitless. I had often heard him spoken of, more especially in connection with the republican movement then in progress in Italy; but I was quite at a loss to imagine what connection could have subsisted between this man and Rachel, or where she had had the opportunity of seeing him. The men left the cell, M. Narelli whispering me to curtail the interview as much as possible, as they were anxious to terminate the first inquiry. So soon as the door was closed, she threw herself at my feet, took from her bosom a small packet, which I opened, and there I saw the picture of a fair child--she might have been seven years of age; and packed up with the picture was a lock of hair, and an address. "As you are the cause of my misery," she said, "be also the source of my happiness, even in this infliction. Give this to my child at the inclosed address, and tell her to love me." "Your child!" I exclaimed, with astonishment. "My child, and by a man who you heard me mention so recently--Flavio!" "And Flavio?" I said. "I shall denounce him," she exclaimed,--"denounce him, as the one great duty which I owe to society, as an atonement for my own sins. And does he not deserve it? Is it but a light thing for a man to ruin me, in the first instance,--to leave me afterwards to starve, and compel me to keep a fruit-stall to gain the shadow of a subsistence,--condemning me to misery and to humiliations which my soul abhorred and loathed? And was that all? I said that you were the cause of my being here in this wretched dungeon; you are the innocent cause, but the man who betrayed me was----" "Was Emmanuel," I interrupted. "Yes, Emmanuel, it is true," she continued; "but there was a traitor prior to him, and greater than him; it was Flavio." "Flavio?"