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Whilst he lives you walk amid swords. His death may spread a panic that will paralyze the others." He would say no more, knowing that he had said enough to send Andreas, scowling and sinister, to sow terror in hearts that guilt must render uneasy now, amongst which hearts be sure that he counted Giovanna's own. Andreas took counsel with Friar Robert.
He began by the secret abduction of Maria of Anjou, his own cousin and Giovanna's sister, a child of fourteen. He kept her concealed for a month in his palace, what time he obtained from the Pope, through the good offices of his uncle the Cardinal of Perigord, a dispensation to overcome the barrier of consanguinity.
A long silence followed Sister Giovanna's speech, and the elder nun looked down at her papers and moved some of them about mechanically, from one place to another on the table. 'Are you angry with me, Mother? asked Sister Giovanna, not understanding. 'With you, child? The Mother looked up, and her face had softened a little. 'No, I am not angry with you at least, I hope I am not.
Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was Giovanna's sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna's sickness, she slowly but surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened at one time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant.
Men and women who have honestly tried to lead the good life for years and have suddenly realised that they are as human as ever before, will understand what I have written. The rest must either believe that it is true or, not believing, read on for the sake of knowing Sister Giovanna's strange story, or else throw my book aside for a dull novel not worth reading.
At Giovanna's first words, though she did not entirely understand them, she became uneasy, because Giovanna interspersed them with sighs. Her voice sounded as if she might have been crying. Aurora had grown accustomed to the fact that those hard old eyes of Giovanna's took easily to tears, and that she sighed by the thousand the moment she was in anxiety over her signorino.
Certain, as soon as she heard them, whose footsteps were on the other side of the door, she held in readiness her Italian. She counted on understanding Giovanna's answer to her question, for she had, as she boasted, "quite a vocabulary." But much more than to this she trusted to the talent which Italians have for making their meaning clear through pantomime and facial expression.
Ippolito Saracinesca had never been in love, even in his early youth; it was no wonder that he was mistaken in such a man as Giovanni Severi. The only danger he reckoned with lay in Sister Giovanna's own heart, and he felt that he could count on her courage, her self-respect, and most of all on her profoundly religious nature. No danger is ever overcome without danger, said Mimos.
The inevitable result, upon which again the subtle Charles had counted, was to exasperate a group of her most prominent nobles into plotting the ruin of Andreas. It was a good beginning, and unfortunately Giovanna's own behaviour afforded Charles the means of further speeding up his game. The young Queen was under the governance of Filippa the Catanese, an evil woman, greedy of power.
The elder woman's white fingers twined round each other more desperately, for Sister Giovanna's face was turned full to her now, and their eyes were meeting; the young nun's were fierce with pain, but the Mother's were strangely lustreless and dull. 'No, she said, mechanically answering the last words, 'you must not see him. 'Not see him once?
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