an
province, except in name. Yet Caterina, while she chafed at many
hampering restrictions which she was powerless to overcome, loved her
people and her work with the strength of desperation, and struggled
bravely on.

It was a relief that the petty warfare of conflicting claimants without
and within her kingdom had ceased; even the importunity from aspiring
suitors came no more--since the same cold answer was ever ready for all,
alike: and to Caterina this also was a relief. For, although of her own
will she could have given but one reply, she had bitterly resented the
imperative command of the Signoria forbidding her second marriage, as an
indignity assuring her that she was not free--and each fresh
importunity was a reminder of her bondage.

If the Cyprian members of the Council of the Realm also saw that the
meshes of Venice were steadily gathering more closely about them, they
had no longer power of resistance against that craftiness of the
Republic which had known how to divert the moneys that should have gone
to the making of a Cyprian Marine, while tickling their love of splendor
with some outward show--yet had kept the island kingdom from
appreciating this great need, by the readiness with which full-manned
Venetian galleys protected the Cyprian coasts whenever they were
threatened with devastation.

More than one letter of resistance and impotent pleading in Caterina's
own hand, had gone from this Daughter of the Republic to the Doge
himself, and passed from the Serenissimo into the secret archives of San
Marco; but the very fact of the appeal was an acknowledgment of Venetian
right, and the evils steadily increased. While Caterina tried to forget
that the clasp of a velvet paw may fatally crush, when the force of an
angry lion is behind it: or--if she remembered it too cruelly in the
hours of her desolate midnight vigils, what could she do but ignore the
insult, with a woman's power of endurance, that she might defer the day
that should separate her from her work and her people with whom her last
dim hopes of happiness were inextricably bound up: for to them she knew
that she was still the Mother Queen--"Nostra Madonna," and the dear
title was a cure for much heart-anguish.

More than once the good Father Johannes--his hair and beard now falling
in thin gray locks about his throat and breast, but the spirit within
him still gleaming fiercely from his deep eyes--had come with painful
steps down the long w