ache much?'

'It feels a little light,' the Princess said, quite naturally, 'but it
does not hurt me now. I think I have been asleep--and dreaming, too.'

Perhaps some suspicion that she had been raving crossed her unsettled
brain, for she glanced quickly at the nun and then shut her eyes.

'Yes,' she said, apparently satisfied; 'I have been dreaming.'

Sister Giovanna only smiled, as sympathetically as she could, and
sitting down by the head of the bed, she stroked the burning forehead
with her cool hand, softly and steadily, for several minutes; and
little by little the Princess sank into a quiet sleep, for she was
exhausted by the effort she had unconsciously made. When she was
breathing regularly, the nun left her side and went noiselessly back
to her seat behind the screen.

She did not open her breviary again that night. For a long time she
sat quite still, with her hands folded on the edge of the table,
gazing into the furthest corner of the room with unwinking eyes.

She had said that she forgave her aunt with all her heart, and she had
believed that it was true; but she was less sure now that she could
think of her past life, and of what might have been if she had not
been driven from her home destitute and forced to take refuge with
Madame Bernard.

In the light of what she had just learned, the past had a very
different look. It was true that she had urged Giovanni to join the
expedition, and had used arguments which had convinced herself as well
as him. But she had made him go because, if he had stayed, he would
have sacrificed his career in the army in order to earn bread for her,
who was penniless. If she had inherited even a part of the fortune
that should have been hers, it never would have occurred to him to
leave the service and go into business for her support; or if it had
crossed his mind, she would have dissuaded him easily enough. So far
as mere money went, he had not wanted or needed it for himself, but
for her; and if she had been rich and had married him, he could not
have been reproached with living on her. To persuade him, she had
urged that his honour required him to accept a post of danger instead
of resigning from the army as soon as it was offered to him, and this
had been true to some extent; but if there had been no question of his
leaving the service, she would have found him plenty of satisfactory
reasons for not going to Africa, and he had not been the kind of man
whom gossi