Magnani marched to meet danger with cold and melancholy courage. He did not feel perfectly happy in love; a craving for violent emotions drove him forward at random toward some extreme goal which appeared to him vaguely as an entire transformation of his present existence and a definitive rupture with the hesitations and languor of his heart. Michel was determined rather than calm. He knew that he was being led by a fanatic to the succor of a man who was probably no less dangerous than useful to the good cause. He knew that he himself was staking a happier and broader existence than that of his companions; but he did not hesitate to play a manly part under the circumstances. The Piccinino was his brother, and although the sympathy he felt for him was blended with suspicion and sadness, he understood his duty. Perhaps too he had become enough of a _prince_ to be unable to endure the thought that his father's son might die at the end of a rope, with a sentence of degradation nailed to his gallows. Still, his heart was sore when he thought of his mother's grief if he should fall in such a reckless undertaking; but he resolutely closed his heart to all human weakness, and walked like the wind, as if he had hoped to wipe out, by forgetting it, the distance that he made haste to put between Agatha and himself. The convent was not under suspicion or surveillance, as the Piccinino was not there, and the police of the Val were well aware that he had crossed the Garreta and gone into hiding in the interior of the island. Fra Angelo had invented danger near at hand to prevent the princess from suspecting the existence of distant but more real dangers. He led his young companions into his cell and assisted them to disguise themselves as monks. They divided the money, the sinews of war, as Fra Angelo said, in order that no one of them might be impeded by the weight of all the coin. They concealed beneath their frocks weapons, powder and ball. Their disguise and their outfitting consumed some time; and Fra Angelo, whose former experience of dangerous undertakings had taught him the evils of precipitation, examined everything with great care and perfect self-possession. In truth their freedom of action depended entirely upon their external aspect. The Capuchin trimmed Magnani's beard, colored Michel's eyebrows and hands, changed the tint of their cheeks and their lips by processes learned in his former profession, and with pigments so prepared as to withstand the action of rain, perspiration, and the compulsory baths to which the police resort in vain attempts to identify their prisoners.