"He'll think as we did, that she has risen from the dead," returned Lambro.
"Well, she has a protector in Captain Cressingham, who will know how to deal with the Master, should he appear."
"Humph! there'll be the devil to pay ere long," growled Lambro. That Jacintha was not married to the old Greek troubled Barbara very little, if at all. Jacintha had brought her back to life; Jacintha was as good as gold; Barbara, figuratively speaking, would have turned and rent any one who should have ventured to assail the reputation of Jacintha.
For, thanks to new influences, Barbara's character was undergoing development. The stateliness and gravity that had marked her bearing on the first night of her coming to Castel Nuovo were yielding to a more buoyant and girlish spirit.
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.
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.