can entertain
no proposal until her children are duly established; or would she, who is
young and lovely and archly capricious, continue to decline the very best
offers of the Milanese nobility, and live on one flat in an old quarter
of the city, instead of in a bright and handsome street, musical with
equipages, and full of the shows of life?'

In conjunction with certain friends of the signora, the count worked
diligently for the immediate restitution of the estates. He was ably
seconded by the young princess of Schyll-Weilingen,--by marriage countess
of Fohrendorf, duchess of Graatli, in central Germany, by which title she
passed,--an Austrian princess; she who had loved Giacomo, and would have
given all for him, and who now loved his widow. The extreme and painful
difficulty was that the Signora Piaveni made no concealment of her
abhorrence of the House of Austria, and hatred of Austrian rule in Italy.
The spirit of her dead husband had come to her from the grave, and warmed
a frame previously indifferent to anything save his personal merits. It
had been covertly communicated to her that if she performed due
submission to the authorities, and lived for six months in good legal,
that is to say, nonpatriotic odour, she might hope to have the estates.
The duchess had obtained this mercy for her, and it was much; for
Giacomo's scheme of revolt had been conceived with a subtlety of genius,
and contrived on a scale sufficient to incense any despotic lord of such
a glorious milch-cow as Lombardy. Unhappily the signora was more inspired
by the remembrance of her husband than by consideration for her children.
She received disaffected persons: she subscribed her money ostentatiously
for notoriously patriotic purposes; and she who, in her father's Como
villa, had been a shy speechless girl, nothing more than beautiful, had
become celebrated for her public letters, and the ardour of declamation
against the foreigner which characterized her style. In the face of such
facts, the estates continued to be withheld from her governance. Austria
could do that: she could wreak her spite against the woman, but she
respected her own law even in a conquered land: the estates were not
confiscated, and not absolutely sequestrated; and, indeed, money coming
from them had been sent to her for the education of her children. It lay
in unopened official envelopes, piled one upon another, quarterly
remittances, horrible as blood of slaughter in h