The police were aroused by the vengeance wreaked upon one of their agents. Persons in the good graces of the government assumed, in aristocratic salons, a menacing attitude toward the patriotic nobles. The Neapolitan faction asserted that the Prince of Castro-Reale had better look to himself if he wished his father's crimes to be forgotten; and, ere long, salutary warnings intended for the princess found their way into her very boudoir. A sincere, but cowardly friend informed her that the assertion of her innocence in the Piccinino's extraordinary document, and the appeal therein made to her son to avenge Castro-Reale, would compromise her very seriously unless she made haste to take some measures dictated by prudence: as, for instance, to present her son to the ruling powers, and to manifest her purpose, indirectly but clearly, to abandon her defunct brigand to the devil, and her bastard stepson's body to the headsman, to be a true and loyal Palmarosa, like her father and uncle before her, and to make herself responsible for the proper political education of the heir of a name so difficult to bear as that of Castro-Reale was likely to be. To these warnings, Agatha replied calmly and judiciously that she never went into society; that she had been living for nearly twenty years in undisturbed seclusion, where no conspiracies had ever been formed; that to take any measures at that moment to obtain the favor of the ruling powers would be in effect to admit the justice of suspicions which she did not deserve; that her son was still a child, brought up in an obscure station and in ignorance of everything outside of the poetry of art; that she would bear boldly, with him, the name of Castro-Reale, because it would be cowardly to deny her marriage and his descent, and that they would not fail to make that name respected, even under the eyes of the police. As for the Piccinino, she very adroitly pretended that she had no idea what they meant, and that she did not believe in the existence of that intangible phantom, a sort of ogre, whose name was used to frighten the little children and old women of the suburbs. She was surprised and distressed by the murder of Abbé Ninfo; but as the will turned up opportunely in Doctor Recuperati's custody, no one could suspect that she owed the recovery of the document to a secret arrangement with the brigands of the mountain. The doctor did not even know that it had been taken from him; for, just as he was about to make a public declaration that Ninfo had stolen it, Agatha had interrupted him, saying: "Be careful, doctor, you are very absent-minded, you know; don't accuse anyone hastily. You showed me the will two days ago; may you not have left it in my chamber, under a piece of mosaic?" An official visit to the place indicated had resulted in finding the will there intact. The doctor, astounded at his carelessness, had believed in it with the others.