“If His justice cannot fail, is not His mercy infinite?” pursued the queen, with the glow of sacred inspiration.  “Even if there were good reason for the fear that has shaken your soul, what fault could not be effaced by a repentance so noble?  Have you not repaired the wrong you may have done your nephew Carobert, by bringing his younger son Andre to your kingdom and marrying him to Joan, your poor Charles’s elder daughter?  Will not they inherit your crown?”

“Alas!” cried Robert, with a deep sigh, “God is punishing me perhaps for thinking too late of this just reparation.  O my good and noble Sandra, you touch a chord which vibrates sadly in my heart, and you anticipate the unhappy confidence I was about to make.  I feel a gloomy presentiment—­and in the hour of death presentiment is prophecy—­that the two sons of my nephew, Louis, who has been King of Hungary since his father died, and Andre, whom I desired to make King of Naples, will prove the scourge of my family.  Ever since Andre set foot in our castle, a strange fatality has pursued and overturned my projects.  I had hoped that if Andre and Joan were brought up together a tender intimacy would arise between the two children; and that the beauty of our skies, our civilisation, and the attractions of our court would end by softening whatever rudeness there might be in the young Hungarian’s character; but in spite of my efforts all has tended to cause coldness, and even aversion, between the bridal pair.  Joan, scarcely fifteen, is far ahead of her age.  Gifted with a brilliant and mobile mind, a noble and lofty character, a lively and glowing fancy, now free and frolicsome as a child, now grave and proud as a queen, trustful and simple as a young girl, passionate and sensitive as a woman, she presents the most striking contrast to Andre, who, after a stay of ten years at our court, is wilder, more gloomy, more intractable than ever.  His cold, regular features, impassive countenance, and indifference to every pleasure that his wife appears to love, all this has raised between him and Joan a barrier of indifference, even of antipathy.  To the tenderest effusion his reply is no more than a scornful smile or a frown, and he never seems happier than when on a pretext of the chase he can escape from the court.  These, then, are the two, man and wife, on whose heads my crown shall rest, who in a short space will find themselves exposed to every passion whose dull growl is now heard below a deceptive calm, but which only awaits the moment when I breathe my last, to burst forth upon them.”

“O my God, my God!” the queen kept repeating in her grief:  her arms fell by her side, like the arms of a statue weeping by a tomb.