It was not possible to explain that curious fact. The princess did not know Michel, she had never seen him; he had not returned to Catania when she had taken Mila's scapulary and exchanged it for this beautiful locket. It is difficult to believe that a woman can fall in love with a man simply at sight of a lock of his hair. Michel cudgeled his brains to no purpose. He could think of no explanation save this, which was far from satisfactory to his intense curiosity: perhaps the princess had at some time been attached to someone whose hair was of precisely the same shade and texture as Michel's. She wore it in a locket. Observing Mila's fervent adoration of that relic of her brother, she had ordered a locket just like her own, and had given it to her. But how impossible are the probabilities of life to a mind of eighteen years! Michel thought it much more probable that he had been loved unseen; and when he was overcome by sleep, the two lockets were still in his half-open hand. When he awoke about noon, he found only one of them; the other had probably fallen among the bedclothes. He pulled his bed to pieces and turned it upside down; passed an hour searching in all the cracks of his floor, and all the folds of his clothes, which lay on a chair by his pillow. One of the two talismans had disappeared. "This is a trick of Signorina Mila," he thought. His door closed with a latch only, and the girl was singing over her work in the room adjoining. "Ah! you are up at last!" she said with a pout, when he appeared in her presence. "That is very lucky! Now will you kindly return my locket?" "I should say, my dear, that you came and took it while I was asleep." "Why, you have it in your hand!" she cried, seizing his hand unexpectedly. "Come, open your fingers, or I will prick them with my needle." "I will do it," he said, "but this locket isn't yours. You have already taken the one that belongs to you." "Really!" said Mila, snatching the trinket from her brother's hand, for he made little resistance, but watched her closely; "this is not mine? Do you think I can be mistaken?" "In that case you have the other, Mila." "What other? Have you one also? I don't know anything about that; but this is mine. Here is the princess's crest. It is my property; it is my souvenir. Take back your hair. If we are at odds, I am willing you should; but this locket shall never leave me again." And she replaced it in her bosom, by no means resolved to take out the hair, for which she cared more than she chose to admit in her childish wrath. Michel returned to his room. The other locket must be there. There was so much candor and confidence in Mila's expression and her words! But he found nothing, and so he determined to search his sister's room as soon as she had gone out. Meanwhile, he tried to make peace with her. He coaxed and cajoled her, and, vowing that all that had happened was only a jest on his part, reproached her with being proud and sensitive.