answered, reluctantly.

"Thank you, my dear lady," said Del Ferice. "And here are the papers.
Make the best use of them you can--any use that you make of them will be
good, I know. How could it be otherwise?"

Donna Tullia's fingers closed upon the large envelope with a grasping
grip, as though she would never relinquish that for which she had paid so
dear a price. She had, indeed, at one time almost despaired of getting
possession of them, and she had passed a terrible hour, besides having
abased herself to the fruitless bribery she had practised upon
Temistocle. But she had gained her end, even at the expense of permitting
Del Ferice to publish her engagement to marry him. She felt that she
could break it off if she decided at last that the union was too
distasteful to her; but she foresaw that, from the point of worldly
ambition, she would be no great loser by marrying a man of such cunning
wit, who possessed such weapons against his enemies, and who, on the
whole, as she believed, entirely sympathised with her view of life. She
recognised that her chances of making a great match were diminishing
rapidly; she could not tell precisely why, but she felt, to her
mortification, that she had not made a good use of her rich widowhood:
people did not respect her much, and as this touched her vanity, she was
susceptible to their lack of deference. She had done no harm, but she
knew that every one thought her an irresponsible woman, and the thrifty
Romans feared her extravagance, though some of them perhaps courted her
fortune: many had admired her, and had to some extent expressed their
devotion, but no scion of all the great families had asked her to be his
wife. The nearest approach to a proposal had been the doubtful attention
she had received from Giovanni Saracinesca during the time when his
headstrong father had almost persuaded him to marry her, and she thought
of her disappointed hopes with much bitterness. To destroy Giovanni by
the revelations she now proposed to make, to marry Del Ferice, and then
to develop her position by means of the large fortune she had inherited
from her first husband, seemed on the whole a wise plan. Del Ferice's
title was not much, to be sure, but, on the other hand, he was intimate
with every one she knew, and for a few thousand scudi she could buy some
small estate with a good title attached to it. She would then change
her mode of life, and assume the pose of a social power, which as a