As she opened the door the gaping crowd of servants slunk out of her way.  With bent head she passed between them, and went out into the great reception-rooms, and sat down alone in her grief.

It was genuine, of its kind.  The poor man’s soul might rest in peace, for she felt the real sorrow at his death which he had longed for, which he had perhaps scarcely dared to hope she would feel.  Had it not been real, in those first moments some thought would have crossed her mind—­some faint, repressed satisfaction at being free at last—­free to marry Giovanni Saracinesca.  But it was not so.  She did not feel free—­she felt alone, intensely alone.  She longed for the familiar sound of his querulous voice—­for the expression of his thousand little wants and interests; she remembered tenderly his harmless little vanities.  She thought of his wig, and she wept.  So true it is that what is most ridiculous in life is most sorrowfully pathetic in death.  There was not one of the small things about him she did not recall with a pang of regret.  It was all over now.  His vanity was dead with him; his tender love for her was dead too.  It was the only love she had known, until that other love—­that dark and stirring passion—­had been roused in her.  But that did not trouble her now.  Perhaps the unconscious sense that henceforth she was free to love whom she pleased had suddenly made insignificant a feeling which had before borne in her mind the terrible name of crime.  The struggle for loyalty was no more, but the memory of what she had borne for the dead man made him dearer than before.  The follies of his life had been many, but many of them had been for her, and there was the true ring in his last words.  “To be young for your sake, Corona—­for your sake!” The phrase echoed again and again in her remembrance, and her silent tears flowed afresh.  The follies of his life had been many, but to her he had been true.  The very violence of his last moments, the tenderness of his passionate appeal for forgiveness, spoke for the honesty of his heart, even though his heart had never been honest before.

She needed never to think again of pleasing him, of helping him, of foregoing for his sake any intimacy with the world which she might desire.  But the thought brought no relief.  He had become so much a part of her life that she could not conceive of living without him, and she would miss him at every turn.  The new existence before her seemed dismal and empty beyond all expression.  She wondered vaguely what she should do with her time.  For one moment a strange longing came over her to return to the dear old convent, to lay aside for ever her coronet and state, and in a simple garb to do simple and good things to the honour of God.

She roused herself at last, and went to her own rooms, dragging her steps slowly as though weighed down by a heavy burden.  She entered the room where he had died, and a cold shudder passed over her.  The afternoon sun was streaming through the window upon the writing table where yet lay the unfinished invitation she had been writing, and upon the plants and the rich ornaments, upon the heavy carpet—­the very spot where he had breathed his last word of love and died at her feet.