ath love's resistless
spell, when a new interruption occurred, shaking her roughly out of
her ecstasy; but this time the young count was able to pass quietly
and calmly into a room adjoining, and Joan prepared to receive her
importunate visitor with severe and frigid dignity.

The individual who arrived at so inopportune a moment was little
calculated to smooth Joan's ruffled brow, being Charles, the eldest son
of the Durazzo family. After he had introduced his fair cousin to the
people as their only legitimate sovereign, he had sought on various
occasions to obtain an interview with her, which in all probability
would be decisive. Charles was one of those men who to gain their end
recoil at nothing; devoured by raging ambition and accustomed from his
earliest years to conceal his most ardent desires beneath a mask of
careless indifference, he marched ever onward, plot succeeding plot,
towards the object he was bent upon securing, and never deviated one
hair's-breadth from the path he had marked out, but only acted with
double prudence after each victory, and with double courage after each
defeat. His cheek grew pale with joy; when he hated most, he smiled; in
all the emotions of his life, however strong, he was inscrutable. He had
sworn to sit on the throne of Naples, and long had believed himself the
rightful heir, as being nearest of kin to Robert of all his nephews. To
him the hand of Joan would have been given, had not the old king in
his latter days conceived the plan of bringing Andre from Hungary and
re-establishing the elder branch in his person, though that had long
since been forgotten. But his resolution had never for a moment been
weakened by the arrival of Andre in the kingdom, or by the profound
indifference wherewith Joan, preoccupied with other passion, had always
received the advances of her cousin Charles of Durazzo. Neither the love
of a woman nor the life of a man was of any account to him when a crown
was weighed in the other scale of the balance.

During the whole time that the queen had remained invisible, Charles
had hung about her apartments, and now came into her presence with
respectful eagerness to inquire for his cousin's health. The young duke
had been at pains to set off his noble features and elegant figure by a
magnificent dress covered with golden fleur-de-lys and glittering with
precious stones. His doublet of scarlet velvet and cap of the same
showed up, by their own splendour, the