"Your ladyship expresses my own wishes."
"If so, we might have the ceremony performed here, in our chapel."
I remembered Father Paphuntius. "No, I'll have nothing to do with that chapel."
Siegfried smiled as he guessed the reason of my embarrassed silence, and then Flamma smiled, and Diodora also. At last, as a smile has a soothing effect on everybody, we all laughed. "No," said Diodora, "I was not speaking of the park hermitage. We have a chapel here in the château, and if we do not invite too many we shall have room enough."
"I shall invite no one but a single witness as my best man."
"But do not ask me to fill that position," said Siegfried; "for I am invited to go buffalo-hunting in Volhynia, and shall start to-morrow."
"There is something else," said Diodora. "After the wedding ceremony I shall hand you over Flamma's dowry, which she has inherited from her grandfather. It consists of a million of florins in good bonds."
I bowed in silence, looking at Flamma.
"No; this is a matter which concerns you as well as her, and you must know that her grandfather laid down the condition that if she, guided by whatever motive, should release herself from the bonds of the Catholic religion, she should lose everything, and surrender the inheritance to collateral relatives."
"I cannot think that such an event could take place at any time."