But she was not listening. She sat with drooping head, her hands listlessly folded in her lap.
'It was all true. All true!' Her tone seemed the utterance of a broken heart. 'And I have mistrusted him, and ... Oh, God!' she cried out. 'When I think that by now he might have been strangled and with my consent. And now ...'
'And now,' cut in her brother almost brutally considering the pain she was already bearing, 'you and that swaggering fool Carmagnola have between you driven him out and perhaps set him against us.'
The swaggering fool came in at that moment with inky fingers and disordered hair. The phrase that greeted him brought him to a halt on the threshold, his attitude magnificent.
'What's this?' he asked with immense dignity.
He was told, by Gian Giacomo, so fiercely and unsparingly that he went red and white by turns as he listened. Then, commanding himself and wrapped in his dignity as in a mantle, he came slowly forward. He even smiled, condescendingly.
'Of all this that you tell I know nothing. It may well be as you say. It is no concern of mine. What concerns me is what has happened here; the discovery that Bellarion was in correspondence with Theodore, and his avowed intention to raise this siege; add to this that he has slipped through our hands, and is now abroad to work your ruin, and consider if you are justified in using hard words to me but for whom your ruin would already have been encompassed.'
His majestic air and his display of magnanimity under their reproach imposed upon all but Valeria.
It was she who answered him:
'You are forgetting that it was only my conviction that he had been Theodore's agent aforetime which disposed me to believe him Theodore's agent now.'