'If he schemes my ruin for my uncle's profit, he goes about it oddly, neglecting opportunities.'
She looked at him with compassion. 'Bellarion never aims where he looks. It is the world says that of him, not I.'
'And at what do you suspect that he is aiming now?'
Her deep eyes grew thoughtful. 'What if he serves our uncle to destroy us, only so that in the end he may destroy our uncle to his own advantage? What if he should aim at a throne?'
Gian Giacomo thought the notion fantastic, the fruit of too much ill-ordered brooding. He said so, laughing.
'If you had studied his methods, Giannino, you would not say that. See how he has wrought his own advancement. In four short years this son of nobody, without so much as a name of his own has become the Knight Bellarion, the Lord Bellarion of the Company of the White Dog, and now the Lord Count of Gavi holding the rich lands of Gavi in feud.'
One there was who might have told her things which would have corrected her judgment, and that was Facino's Countess. For the Lady Beatrice knew the truth of those events in Montferrat which were at the root of the Princess Valeria's bitter prejudice, of which also she was aware.
'You hate him very bitterly,' the Countess told her once when Bellarion had been the subject of their talk.
'Would not you, if you were in my place?'
And the Countess, looking at her with those long indolent eyes of hers, an inscrutable smile on her red lips, had answered with languorous slowness: 'In your place it is possible that I should.'