Odo found the hunchback changed.  He had withered like Trescorre, but under the harsher blight of physical privations; and his tongue had an added bitterness.  He replied evasively to all enquiries as to what had become of him during his absence from Pianura; but on Odo’s asking for news of Momola and the child he said coldly:  “They are both dead.”

“Dead?” Odo exclaimed.  “Together?”

“There was scarce an hour between them,” Gamba answered.  “She said she must keep alive as long as the boy needed her—­after that she turned on her side and died.”

“But of what disorder?  How came they to sicken at the same time?”

The hunchback stood silent, his eyes on the ground.  Suddenly he raised them and looked full at the Duke.

“Those that saw them called it the plague.”

“The plague?  Good God!” Odo slowly returned his stare.  “Is it possible—­” he paused—­“that she too was at the feast of the Madonna?”

“She was there, but it was not there that she contracted the distemper.”

“Not there—?”

“No; for she dragged herself from her bed to go.”

There was another silence.  The hunchback had lowered his eyes.  The Duke sat motionless, resting his head on his hand.  Suddenly he made a gesture of dismissal...

Two months after his state entry into Pianura Odo married his cousin’s widow.

It surprised him, in looking back, to see how completely the thought of Maria Clementina had passed out of his life, how wholly he had ceased to reckon with her as one of the factors in his destiny.  At her child’s death-bed he had seen in her only the stricken mother, centred in her loss, and recalling, in an agony of tears, the little prince’s prophetic vision of the winged playmates who came to him carrying toys from Paradise.  After Prince Ferrante’s death she had gone on a long visit to her uncle of Monte Alloro; and since her return to Pianura she had lived in the dower-house, refusing Odo’s offer of a palace in the town.  She had first shown herself to the public on the day of the state entry; and now, her year of widowhood over, she was again the consort of a reigning Duke of Pianura.

No one was more ignorant than her husband of the motives determining her act.  As Duchess of Monte Alloro she might have enjoyed the wealth and independence which her uncle’s death had bestowed on her, but in marrying again she resigned the right to her new possessions, which became vested in the crown of Pianura.  Was it love that had prompted the sacrifice?  As she stood beside him on the altar steps of the Cathedral, as she rode home beside him between their shouting subjects, Odo asked himself the question again and again.  The years had dealt lightly with her, and she had crossed the threshold of the thirties with the assured step of a woman who has no cause to fear what awaits her.  But her blood no longer spoke her thoughts, and the transparence of youth had changed to a brilliant density.  He could not penetrate beneath the surface of her smile:  she seemed to him like a beautiful toy which might conceal a lacerating weapon.