Close to the castle a semicircle of dark rocks, with a sandy base, over which the tide flowed, formed an ideal bathing place. Every morning Barbara would seek this spot attended by Jacintha. "Wouldn't Abbess Teresa and the nuns be scandalized if they saw me now?" she would remark as she returned to breakfast, laughing and wringing out her dark wet locks like some lovely Nereid. She was a maiden formed for gayety. In previous days her natural disposition had evidently been kept under restraint. She was now revelling in the sunshine of a new and sweet liberty, and Jacintha could scarcely believe her own eyes, when one day, attracted by the sounds of sweet laughter and of ringing steel proceeding from an adjoining apartment, she peeped in and discovered the cause of it all to be Barbara, who was receiving her first lesson in fencing from Paul, while Lambro looked on with sombre approval. "What next, I wonder?" thought Jacintha. Barbara illumined the dark and melancholy castle like a sunbeam. Even Lambro relaxed something of his moroseness in her presence, and had begun to doubt whether five hundred beshliks could procure in the mart of Janina a maiden in all respects like Barbara. She had taken to Lambro much more than Paul had, who could not overcome his secret distrust of the old Palicar. But then Lambro was a hero in Barbara's eyes, because he had fought for the freedom of a conquered race, and she herself, as it subsequently transpired, was the daughter of a conquered race. When the day's strolling with Paul was over, and the evening meal finished, she would invite the old Greek to fight his battles over again. Sitting on a low stool at his feet, and resting her elbows on her lap and her chin on her hands, her hair sometimes falling in dusky waves around her fair throat, she would betray such interest in Lambro's reminiscences that the foolish Paul was often moved to jealousy. "And by deeds such as these," she murmured on one occasion, "was the freedom of Hellas won. Why should not Poland achieve what Greece has achieved?" "So, signorina, you are of Polish blood?" smiled Paul. "And am proud of my nationality." "I would for your sake that your people were free." "They _will_ be free again," she answered, a beautiful heroic look transfiguring her face with a new light. "Oh! Kosciusko," she cried, with an outburst of patriotism that quite surprised Paul, "why did you say '_Finis Poloniæ_'? Because _you_ said it, men have come to believe it. No, no, it is not true. The greenstone sceptre of Poland may lie in the treasury of the Kremlin broken in halves, but the spirit of the Polish people is not broken. Would that I had been born a man that I might shoulder musket and fight for fatherland! The Princess Radzivil fought on horseback against the Russians, and why may not I?" And then raising her wine-glass aloft, she added, "Confusion to the Czar!"