“Do you want anything?”

“No—­nothing especial.”

Saracinesca’s eye fell upon the pile of manuscripts that lay on the table.  It struck him that Giovanni might occupy himself by looking them over, while he himself finished the letter he had begun.

“There are those deeds relating to San Giacinto,” he said, “you might look through them before they are put away.  Montevarchi borrowed them for a day or two and has just sent them back.”

Giovanni took the bundle and established himself in a comfortable chair beside a low stand, where the light of a lamp fell upon the pages as he turned them.  He made no remark, but began to examine the documents, one by one, running his eye rapidly along the lines, as he read on mechanically, not half comprehending the sense of the words.  He was preoccupied by thoughts of Corona and of what had lately happened, so that he found it hard to fix his attention.  The prince’s pen scratched and spattered on the paper, and irritated Giovanni, for the old gentleman wrote a heavy, nervous handwriting, and lost his temper twenty times in five minutes, mentally cursing the ink, the paper and the pen, and wishing he could write like a shopman or a clerk.

Giovanni’s attention was arrested by the parchment on which the principal deed was executed, and he began to read the agreement with more care than he had bestowed upon the other papers.  He understood Latin well enough, but the crabbed characters puzzled him from time to time.  He read the last words on the first page without thinking very much of what they meant.

“....  Eo tamen pacto, quod si praedicto Domino Leoni ex legitimo matrimonio heres nasceretur, instrumentum hoc nullum, vanum atque plane invalidum fiat.”

Giovanni smiled at the quaint law Latin, and then read the sentence over again.  His face grew grave as he realised the tremendous import of those few words.  Again and again he translated the phrase, trying to extract from it some other meaning than that which was so unpleasantly clear.  No other construction, however, could be put upon what was written, and for some minutes Giovanni sat staring at the fire, bewildered and almost terrified by his discovery.

“Have you ever read those papers?” he asked at last, in a voice that made his father drop his pen and look up.

“Not for thirty years.”

“Then you had better read them at once.  San Giacinto is Prince Saracinesca and you and I are nobody.”

Saracinesca uttered a fierce oath and sprang from his chair.

“What do you mean?” he asked, seizing Giovanni’s arm violently with one hand and taking the parchment with the other.

“Read for yourself.  There—­at the foot of the page, from ’eo tamen pacto.’  It is plain enough.  It says, ’On the understanding that if an heir be born to the aforesaid Don Leone, in lawful wedlock, the present instrument shall be wholly null, void and inefficacious.”  An heir was born, and San Giacinto is that heir’s grandson.  You may tear up the document.  It is not worth the parchment it is written upon, nor are we either.”