"Good priests are like good women," said the peasant, drily; "there are plenty of them, but they are all underground." On which remark the wife tried to box his ears. The contadino had become a freethinker since the accession of the house of Savoy. His wife remained a good Catholic. Said the peasant as, escaping from his wife, he walked into the high-road with Graham, "My belief, Eccellenza, is, that the priest did all the mischief." "What mischief?" "Persuaded the Signora to leave her husband. The Inglese was not a Catholic. I heard the priest call him a heretic. And the padre, who, though not so bad as some of his cloth, was a meddling bigot, thought it perhaps best for her soul that it should part company with a heretic's person. I can't say for sure, but I think that was it. The padre seemed to triumph when the Signora was gone." Graham mused. The peasant's supposition was not improbable. A woman such as Louise Duval appeared to be--of vehement passions and ill-regulated mind--was just one of those who, in a moment of great sorrow, and estranged from the ordinary household affections, feel, though but imperfectly, the necessity of a religion, and, ever in extremes, pass at once from indifferentism into superstition. Arrived at Naples, Graham heard little of Selby except as a literary recluse, whose only distraction from books was the operatic stage. But he heard much of Isaura; of the kindness which Madame de Grantmesnil had shown to her, when left by Selby's death alone in the world; of the interest which the friendship and the warm eulogies of one so eminent as the great French writer had created for Isaura in the artistic circles; of the intense sensation her appearance, her voice, her universal genius, had made in that society, and the brilliant hopes of her subsequent career on the stage the cognoscenti had formed. No one knew anything of her mother; no one entertained a doubt that Isaura was by birth a Cicogna. Graham could not learn the present whereabouts of Madame de Grantmesnil. She had long left Naples, and had been last heard of at Genoa; was supposed to have returned to France a little before the war. In France she had no fixed residence. The simplest mode of obtaining authentic information whether Isaura was the daughter of Ludovico Cicogna by his first wife--namely, by registration of her birth--failed him; because, as von Rudesheim had said, his first wife was a Frenchwoman. The children had been born somewhere in France, no one could even guess where. No one had ever seen the first wife, who had never appeared in Italy, nor had even heard what was her maiden name.