To my unutterable surprise, these words,
harmless as they appeared to me, produced the
same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight
of Pesca had produced on the Count. The rosy
face of my little friend whitened in an instant;
and he drew back from me slowly, trembling
from head to foot.

"Walter!" he said. "You don't know what
you ask."

He spoke in a whisper—he looked at me as if
I had suddenly revealed to him some hidden
danger to both of us. In less than one minute
of time, he was so altered from the easy,
lively, quaint little man of all my past
experience, that if I had met him in the street,
changed as I saw him now, I should most
certainly not have known him again.

"Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained
and shocked you," I replied. "Remember the
cruel wrong my wife has suffered at Count
Fosco's hands. Remember that the wrong can
never be redressed, unless the means are in my
power of forcing him to do her justice. I spoke
in her interests, Pesca—I ask you again to
forgive me—I can say no more."

I rose to go. He stopped me before I reached
the door.

"Wait," he said. "You have shaken me
from head to foot. You don't know how I left
my country, and why I left my country. Let
me compose myself—let me think, if I can."

I returned to my chair. He walked up and
down the room, talking to himself incoherently
in his own language. After several turns
backwards and forwards, he suddenly came up to me,
and laid his little hands with a strange tenderness
and solemnity on my breast.

"On your heart and soul, Walter," he said,
"is there no other way to get to that man but
the chance-way through me?"

"There is no other way," I answered.

He left me again; opened the door of the
room and looked out cautiously into the
passage; closed it once more; and came back.

"You won your right over me, Walter," he
said, " on the day when you saved my life. It
was yours from that moment, when you pleased
to take it. Take it now. Yes! I mean what I
say. My next words, as true as the good God
is above us, will put my life into your hands."

The trembling earnestness with which he
uttered this extraordinary warning, carried with
it to my mind the conviction that he spoke the
truth.

"Mind this!" he went on, shaking his hands
at me in the vehemence of his agitation. "I
hold no thread, in my own mind, between that
man, Fosco, and the past time which I call back
to me, for your sake. If you find the thread,
keep it to yourself—tell me nothing—on my
knees, I beg and pray, let me be ignorant, let me
be innocent, let me be blind to all the future, as
I am now!"

He said a few words more, hesitatingly and
disconnectedly—then stopped again.

I saw that the effort of expressing himself in
English, on an occasion too serious to permit
him the use of the quaint turns and phrases of
his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing
the difficulty he had felt from the first in speaking
to me at all. Having learnt to read and understand
his native language (though not to speak
it), in the earlier days of our intimate
companionship, I now suggested to him that he
should express himself in Italian, while I used
English in putting any questions which might
be necessary to my enlightenment. He
accepted the proposal. In his own smooth-flowing
language—spoken with a vehement agitation
which betrayed itself in the perpetual working
of his features, in the wildness and the suddenness
of his foreign gesticulations, but never in
the raising of his voice—I now heard the words
which armed me to meet the last struggle that
is left for this story to record.*

* It is only right to mention, here, that I repeat
Pesca's statement to me, with the careful suppressions
and alterations which the serious nature of
the subject and my own sense of duty to my friend
demand. My first and last concealments from the
reader are those which caution renders absolutely
necessary in this portion ot the narrative.

"You know nothing of my motive for leaving
Italy," he began, "except that it was for
political reasons. If I had been driven to this
country by the persecution of my government, I
should not have kept those reasons a secret from
you or from any one. I have concealed them
because no government authority has pronounced
the sentence of my exile. You have heard,
Walter, of the political Societies that are hidden
in every great city on the continent of Europe?
To one of those Societies I belonged in Italy—
and belong still, in England. When I came to
this country, I came by the direction of my
Chief. I was over-zealous, in my younger
time; I ran the risk of compromising myself
and others. For those reasons, I was ordered
to emigrate to England, and to wait. I
emigrated—I have waited—I wait, still. To-morrow,
I may be called away: ten years hence, I may
be called away. It is all one to me—I am here,
I support myself by teaching, and I wait. I
violate no oath (you shall hear why presently)
in making my confidence complete by telling you
the name of the Society to which I belong. All
I do is to put my life in your hands. If what
I say to you now is ever known by others to
have passed my lips, as certainly as we two sit
here, I am a dead man."

He whispered the next words in my ear. I
keep the secret which he thus communicated.
The Society to which he belonged, will be
sufficiently individualised for the purpose of these
pages, if I call it "The Brotherhood," on the
few occasions when any reference to the subject
will be needed in this place.

"The object of the Brotherhood," Pesca went
on, "is, briefly, the object of other political
societies of the same sort—the destruction of
tyranny, and the assertion of the rights of the
people. The principles of the Brotherhood are
two. So long as a man's life is useful, or even
harmless only, he has the right to enjoy it. But,