“Ah, madam, dismiss me also; for I shall never be strong enough to do so hard a bidding:  the unhappy man who cannot awake in your heart so much as a feeling of pity may now be struck down by yourself in your wrath, for here he stands; he has heard your sentence, and come to die at your feet.”

The last words were spoken in a louder voice, so that they might be heard from outside, and Bertrand of Artois came hurriedly into the room and fell on his knees before the queen.  For a long time past the young lady-in-waiting had perceived that Robert of Cabane had, through his own fault, lost the love of Joan; for his tyranny had indeed become more unendurable to her than her husband’s.

Dona Cancha had been quick enough to perceive that the eyes of her young mistress were wont to rest with a kind of melancholy gentleness on Bertrand, a young man of handsome appearance but with a sad and dreamy expression; so when she made up her mind to speak in his interests, she was persuaded that the queen already loved him.  Still, a bright colour overspread Joan’s face, and her anger would have fallen on both culprits alike, when in the next room a sound of steps was heard, and the voice of the grand seneschal’s widow in conversation with her son fell on the ears of the three young people like a clap of thunder.  Dona Cancha, pale as death, stood trembling; Bertrand felt that he was lost—­all the more because his presence compromised the queen; Joan only, with that wonderful presence of mind she was destined to preserve in the most difficult crises of her future life, thrust the young man against the carved back of her bed, and concealed him completely beneath the ample curtain:  she then signed to Cancha to go forward and meet the governess and her son.

But before we conduct into the queen’s room these two persons, whom our readers may remember in Joan’s train about the bed of King Robert, we must relate the circumstances which had caused the family of the Catanese to rise with incredible rapidity from the lowest class of the people to the highest rank at court.  When Dona Violante of Aragon, first wife of Robert of Anjou, became the mother of Charles, who was later on the Duke of Calabria, a nurse was sought for the infant among the most handsome women of the people.  After inspecting many women of equal merit as regards beauty, youth and health, the princess’s choice lighted on Philippa, a young Catanese woman, the wife of a fisherman of Trapani, and by condition a laundress.  This young woman, as she washed her linen on the bank of a stream, had dreamed strange dreams:  she had fancied herself summoned to court, wedded to a great personage, and receiving the honours of a great lady.  Thus when she was called to Castel Nuovo her joy was great, for she felt that her dreams now began to be realised.  Philippa was installed at the court, and a few months after she began to nurse the child the fisherman was dead and she was a widow.  Meanwhile Raymond of