He bent over her passionately, a thousand reasons rushing to his rescue, clamoring to be told her.  “Marina, beloved, there is nothing to fear!” he cried desperately, eager for his own defense, resolute to make her comprehend the perfect safety of Venice, to calm the beseeching horror in her eyes; “Fra Paolo will come!”

Her gaze relaxed, her eyelids quivered and closed; she had fainted.

—­Or was it death?

He folded her to his heart with a cry of desolation.

The Lady Beata hastily thrust him aside and opened the white robe at the throat, and Marcantonio started back; there were stripes of half-healed laceration on the tender flesh—­some fresh, as if but just raised by the lash.

“Ay, my lord,” Beata answered very low, to his quick, grieved question; “all that a daughter of the Church may do hath our lady added to her prayers for Venice.  She hath been rigorous in fasting and in penance until her strength is gone; but the pain of it she feeleth not, because of the greater pain of her soul, which is lost in supplication that availeth naught.”

Leonardo Donato would be very gracious to the Lady of the Giustiniani, though she had come so near to costing the city a divided vote, because he had seen the misery in her eyes with her great love for Venice, and because the Council had so declared its vote for the State that he could afford to be magnanimous.  Nay, since even the Senator Marcantonio had not flinched before that wonderful agonized white face, he need not confine her, as he had intended, in a convent for decorous keeping; he was glad of the change in her favor which would prevent the harshness that might have increased her influence to the degree of danger.  He sent, instead, a gracious message by his secretary—­“Might the father pay a visit to his daughter of the Republic to inquire of her welfare and assure her of his favor, before she returned to her palace?”

But the message of courtesy, sent by the Doge himself, had been stayed on the threshold of his own state salon.

* * * * *

The Republic had, indeed, quitted herself nobly in her vote; so valiant a blow had she struck for the rights of princes that this consciousness rang out in the bold tones of her announcement to the courts of Europe—­“Which things we have thought best to tell you for your sole information, so that if mention be made of them to you, and not else, you may be able to answer to the purpose and to justify this our most righteous cause.”

And from the moment that the Senate had been unofficially apprised by Nani that the terrible Interdict was already printed and would presently be fulminated, every possible precaution of self-defense had been put in operation throughout the dominions of Venice, with an ingenuity, a foresight, and a celerity which the watching courts of Europe not only viewed with amazement, but accepted as an evidence of the conscious power and justice of the Republic.  Overtures came fast from England, from Spain, from France—­every monarch wished some share in the pacification between these courts of Rome and Venice.