"I am not angry," answered Corona, quietly. "I am merely giving you an immediate opportunity of proving your assertion and your sanity."
"My sanity!" exclaimed Donna Tullia, angrily. "Do you seriously believe—"
"Nothing that you say," said Corona, completing the sentence.
Unable to bear the situation, Madame Mayer rose suddenly from her seat, and began to pace the small room with short, angry steps.
"You shall see," she said, fiercely—"you shall see that it is all true. You shall see this man's face when I accuse him—you shall see him humiliated, overthrown, exposed in his villany—the wretch! You shall see how—"
Corona's strong voice interrupted her enemy's invective in ringing tones.
"Be silent!" she cried. "In twenty minutes he will be here. But if you say one word against him before he comes, I will lock you into this room and leave you. I certainly will not hear you."
Donna Tullia reflected that the Duchessa was in her own house, and moreover that she was not a woman to be trifled with. She threw herself into a chair, and taking up a book that lay upon the table, she pretended to read.
Corona remained seated by the fireplace, glancing at her from time to time. She was strangely inclined to laugh at the whole situation, which seemed to her absurd in the extreme—for it never crossed her mind to believe that there was a word of truth in the accusation against Giovanni. Nevertheless she was puzzled to account for Donna Tullia's assurance, and especially for her readiness to face the man she so calumniated. A quarter of an hour elapsed in this armed silence—the two women glancing at each other from time to time, until the distant sound of wheels rolling under the great gate announced that the messenger had returned from the Palazzo Saracinesca, probably conveying Don Giovanni and his father.
"Then you have made up your mind to the humiliation of the man you love?" asked Donna Tullia, looking up from her book with a sneer on her face.