Zara poured something out of a bottle into a cup, and Pietro held it to the sick woman's livid lips.
She choked and swallowed, and, as if by magic, lay still in his arms.
Very tenderly he laid her back on the bed.
"She will sleep now, Zara," he said. "Let us go."
They descended the stairs. Down below, the man laid his hands on his wife's shoulders and looked into her face.
"Watch her, Zara," he said, "for she is mad, and the very first opportunity she will make her escape and seek out Sir Jasper Kingsland; and that is the very last thing I want. So watch your mother well."
CHAPTER IV.
AN UNINVITED GUEST.
Sir Jasper Kingsland stood moodily alone. He was in the library, standing by the window—that very window through which, one stormy night scarcely a month before, he had admitted Achmet the Astrologer. He stood there with a face of such dark gloom that all the brightness of the sunlit April day could not cast one enlivening gleam.
He stood there scowling darkly upon it all, so lost in his own somber thoughts that he did not hear the library door open, nor the soft rustle of a woman's dress as she halted on the threshold.
A fair and stately lady, with a proud, colorless face lighted up with pale-blue eyes, and with bands of pale flaxen hair pushed away under a dainty lace cap—a lady who looked scarce thirty, although almost ten years older, unmistakably handsome, unmistakably proud. It was Olivia, Lady Kingsland.