on to
gain a point of view from which the inexplicable behaviour of his
mistress presented a very different aspect.

Arrived at Naples the Princess and her suite were met by Queen Caroline
and installed in a charming villa near the city, and on the succeeding
day the entire household were taken by the King and Queen for a short
cruise in the royal yacht.

Outside the island of Ischia the party landed, and climbing to a ruined
tower which commanded an extensive prospect, they plainly discerned in a
hidden cove a little craft flying a flag unfamiliar at that time to
Celio Benvoglio, a striped red and white pennon studded with golden
bees. It was the ensign chosen by Napoleon while lord of Elba, and
displayed by the six swift sailing pinnaces which made up the Emperor's
little navy.

Pauline now informed her suite that she was about to pay a visit to her
brother, which for important reasons must not for the present be
suspected. Her maids of honour must therefore return to her Neapolitan
villa, and, to keep up the fiction of her presence, announce on the
morrow that the Princess had succumbed to an attack of fever. The Court
physician would pay daily visits as would the King and Queen, but no
others would be admitted to the secret.

With feminine fondness for intrigue the three maids of honour entered
into the plan, while Celio, relieved from his tormenting suspicions
accompanied his mistress to Elba.

Here, admitted to her conferences with her brother as he fulfilled new
and arduous duties in the transcription of dispatches, he comprehended
that the secret alliance between the Princess and Murat had been purely
political, and with what tact she had won him to reconciliation and
co-operation with Napoleon.

The Emperor's plans were more audacious and far-reaching than ever. In
their scope the movement for the independence and unification of Italy
was but a subordinate detail. Pauline knew that her brother was
developing a great _coup d'etat_, that he would presently escape from
Elba and seize again the reins of power, and it was she who had first
perceived and who now explained to him how the undercurrent of events
in Italy might become a factor in his scheme.

Agitators had been busy in every part of the peninsula firing patriot
hearts to throw off the domination of the three foreign powers which
held them enslaved. The King of Naples by naturalising himself as an
Italian, and compelling his French soldiers to do