The young painter's distress was intensified by the fact that, under the mysterious influence of that all-pervading passion, which but just born was already spreading with the rapidity of a conflagration, the bandit acquired a strange power of fascination. His exquisite beauty shone forth like a star emerging from the vapors on the horizon. All that was unusual in the outlines of his features and disquieting in their veiled expression gave way to a subtle charm, an overpowering effusiveness, albeit silent, and, as it were, overwhelmed by its own ardor. He was lying back in his chair, but no longer affected indifference or absent-mindedness. His hanging arms, his bent back, his eyes, glistening and fascinated, and fixed intently on the princess, indicated that he was shattered, as it were, by the explosion of a force unknown to himself, and drowned in the anticipated joys of his triumph. Michel was afraid of him for the first time. He would still have defied him fearlessly in the ill-omened solitude of the _Destatore's Cross_; but in that room, radiant with a strange ecstasy, he seemed too overpowering for any woman to escape the fascination of that basilisk glance. However, Agatha did not seem to notice it, and whenever he turned his eyes from the bandit to her, he found her apparently calm and undisturbed, having no thought either of attacking or of defending herself. "My friends," she said, after pausing a moment to take breath, "we can say good-night and separate with our minds at rest. I place my full confidence in this new friend whom Providence, acting through the wisdom of Fra Angelo, has sent to us. You will share my confidence when I tell you that he knew beforehand, and knew far better than ourselves, what we had to fear and to hope."