Riccabocca resumed, as he adjusted the pocket-handkerchief, "I have a right to your confidence, my child, for I have been afflicted in my day; yet I too say with thee, 'I have not done wrong.' Cospetto!" (and here the doctor seated himself deliberately, resting one arm on the side column of the stocks, in familiar contact with the captive's shoulder, while his eye wandered over the lovely scene around)--"Cospetto! my prison, if they had caught me, would not have had so fair a look-out as this.

But, to be sure, it is all one; there are no ugly loves, and no handsome prisons." With that sententious maxim, which, indeed, he uttered in his native Italian, Riccabocca turned round and renewed his soothing invitations to confidence.

A friend in need is a friend indeed, even if he come in the guise of a Papist and wizard.

All Lenny's ancient dislike to the foreigner had gone, and he told him his little tale.
Dr.Riccabocca was much too shrewd a man not to see exactly the motives which had induced Mr.Stirn to incarcerate his agent (barring only that of personal grudge, to which Lenny's account gave him no clew).

That a man high in office should make a scapegoat of his own watch-dog for an unlucky snap, or even an indiscreet bark, was nothing strange to the wisdom of the student of Machiavelli.