ncy.

"I will see him presently," said the Baron, with an impassive
expression, and Felice went out silently, as one who had seen nothing.

The Baron's calm dignity was wounded. "Be so good as to have some regard
for me in the presence of my servants," he said. "I understand your
feelings, but you are much too excited to see things in their proper
light. You have been publicly insulted and degraded, but you must not
talk to me as if it were my fault."

"Then whose is it? If it is not your fault, whose fault is it?" she
said, and the Baron thought her red eyes flashed up at him with an
expression of hate. He took the blow full in the face, but made no
reply, and his silence broke her answer.

"No, no, that was too bad," she said, and she reached over to him, and
he kissed her and then sat down beside her and took her hand and held
it. At the next moment her brilliant eyes had filled with tears and her
head was down and the hot drops were falling on to the back of his hand.

"I suppose it is all over," she said.

"Don't say that," he answered. "We don't know what a day may bring
forth. Before long I may have it in my power to silence every slander
and justify you in the eyes of all."

At that she raised her head with a smile and seemed to look beyond the
Baron at something in the vague distance, while the glass top of the
table, which had been clouded by her breath, cleared gradually, and
revealed a large house almost hidden among trees. It was a photograph of
the Baron's castle in the Alban hills.

"Only," continued the Baron, "you must get rid of that man Bruno."

"I will discharge him this very day--I will! I will! I will!"

There was an intense bitterness in the thought that what David Rossi had
said must have come of what her own servant told him--that Bruno had
watched her in her own house day by day, and that time after time the
two men had discussed her between them.

"I could kill him," she said.

"Bruno Rocco?"

"No, David Rossi."

"Have patience; he shall be punished," said the Baron.

"How?"

"He shall be put on his trial."

"What for?"

"Sedition. The law allows a man to say what he will about a Prime
Minister, but he must not foretell the overthrow of the King. The fellow
has gone too far at last. He shall go to Santo Stefano."

"What good will that do?"

"He will be silenced--and crushed."

She looked at the Baron with a sidelong smile, and something in her
heart, which she did n