The dreams came and went and she was too sensible not to laugh at them.  That was not the youth of Giovanni, her husband, nor of men who even faintly resembled him in her estimation.  Giovanni had wandered far, had seen much, and had undoubtedly indulged more than one passing affection, before he had been thirty years of age and had loved Corona.  Giovanni would laugh too, if she told him of her vision of two young and beautiful married saints.  And his laugh would be more sincere than her own.  Nevertheless, her dreams haunted her, as they have haunted many a loving mother, ever since Althaea plucked from the flame the burning brand that measured Meleager’s life, and smothered the sparks upon it and hid it away among her treasures.

Such things seem foolish, no doubt, in the measure of fact, in the glaring light of our day.  The thought is none the less noble.  The dream of an untainted love, the vision of unspotted youth and pure maiden, the glory of unbroken faith kept whole by man and wife in holy wedlock, the pride of stainless name and stainless race—­these things are not less high because there is a sublimity in the strength of a great sin which may lie the closer to our sympathy, as the sinning is the nearer to our weakness.

When old Saracinesca looked up from under his bushy brows and laughed and said that his grandson was in love, he thought no more of what he said than if he had remarked that Orsino’s beard was growing or that Giovanni’s was turning grey.  But Corona’s pretty fancies received a shock from which they never recovered again, and though she did her best to call them back they lost all their reality from that hour.  The plain fact that at one and twenty years the boy is a man, though a very young one, was made suddenly clear to her, and she was faced by another fact still more destructive of her ideals, namely, that a man is not to be kept from falling in love, when and where he is so inclined, by any personal influence whatsoever.  She knew that well enough, and the supposition that his first young passion might be for Madame d’Aranjuez was by no means comforting.  Corona immediately felt an interest in that lady which she had not felt before and which was not altogether friendly.

It seemed to her necessary in the first place to find out something definite concerning Maria Consuelo, and this was no easy matter.  She communicated her wish to her husband when they were alone that evening.

“I know nothing about her,” answered Giovanni.  “And I do not know any one who does.  After all it is of very little importance.”

“What if he falls seriously in love with this woman?”

“We will send him round the world.  At his age that will cure anything.  When he comes back Madame d’Aranjuez will have retired to the chaos of the unknown out of which Orsino has evolved her.”

“She does not look the kind of woman to disappear at the right moment,” observed Corona doubtfully.