other--my father----'

'No. She whom you called your mother was my elder sister. I ran away
with the man I loved, because he was a Protestant and poor, and my
parents would not allow the marriage. We were married in his Church,
but my family would have nothing more to do with me. I was an outcast
for them, disgraced, never to be mentioned. Your own father died of
typhoid fever a few days before you were born. I was ill a long time,
ill and poor, almost starving. I wrote to my sister, imploring help.
She and her husband bargained with me. They agreed to make a long
journey and bring you back as their child. They promised that you
should be splendidly provided for; you would be an heiress, all that
my brother-in-law could legally dispose of should go to you; but I was
to disappear for ever and never let the truth be known. What could I
do? You were two months old and I was penniless. I let them take you,
and I became a nursing sister. It was like tearing off a limb, but I
let you go to the glorious future that was before you. At least, you
would have all the world held, to make up for my love, and I knew they
would be kind to you. They were ashamed of me, that was all. They said
that I was not married! You know how rigid they were, with their
traditions and prejudices! That is my story. I have kept my word, and
their secret, until to-day.'

Sister Giovanna listened with wide eyes and parted lips, for the world
she had lived in during more than five-and-twenty years was wrenched
from its path and sent whirling into space at a tangent she could not
follow; there was nothing firm under her feet, she had nothing
substantial left, not even the name she had once called her own. It
had all been unreal. The dead Knight of Malta lying in state in the
great palace had not been her father; the delicate woman with the
ascetic face, who had died when she had been a little child, had not
been her mother; they had never registered her birth at the
Municipality because she had not been their child and had not even
been born in Rome; they had not taken the proper legal steps to adopt
her and make her their heir, because they had been ashamed of her own
mother. And her own mother was before her, Mother Veronica, the
Superior of the Convent in which she had taken refuge because they had
left her a destitute, nameless, penniless waif, after promising to
make her their daughter in the eyes of the law. She knew that without
a certificate of