"No! if I had been told that you were my sister, I should have believed it when I saw you. Oh! what good fortune that you are still so young and so lovely! You will live as long as I do, won't you? I shall not have the misfortune to lose you! Lose you!--Ah! now that my life is bound to yours, the thought of death frightens me, I would like to die neither before nor after you. But is this the first time that we have ever been together? I am searching the vague memories of my infancy in the hope of finding some trace of you." "My poor child," said the princess, "I never saw you before the day when, as I looked at you through a window of the gallery where you were sleeping, I could not restrain a cry of love and of agonizing joy, which woke you. Three months ago I did not even know of your existence. I believed that you died on the day you were born. Otherwise, do you suppose that I would not have come to Rome, in some disguise or other, to take you in my arms and rescue you from the dangers of a solitary life? On the day that Pier-Angelo told me that he had rescued you from the hands of a villainous midwife, who was about to put you in a hospital, by order of my parents, that he had fled with you to a foreign country, and had brought you up as his son, I insisted upon starting for Rome. I would have done it too, but for the prudence of Fra Angelo, who pointed out to me that your life would be in danger as long as the cardinal lived, and that it was better to await his death than to expose us all to suspicions and investigations. Ah! my son, how horribly I suffered while I lived alone with the ghastly memories of my youth! Branded from my girlhood, maltreated, secluded and persecuted by my family, because I would not disclose the name of the man whom I had consented to marry as soon as the first symptoms of pregnancy appeared; parted from my child, and cursed for the tears which his alleged death caused me to shed; threatened with the horror of seeing him killed before my eyes, when I yielded to the hope that they had deceived me--the best years of my life passed amid tears of despair and shudders of horror.