The extreme and painful difficulty was that the Signora Piaveni made no concealment of her abhorrence of the House of Austria, and hatred of Austrian rule in Italy.  The spirit of her dead husband had come to her from the grave, and warmed a frame previously indifferent to anything save his personal merits.  It had been covertly communicated to her that if she performed due submission to the authorities, and lived for six months in good legal, that is to say, nonpatriotic odour, she might hope to have the estates.  The duchess had obtained this mercy for her, and it was much; for Giacomo’s scheme of revolt had been conceived with a subtlety of genius, and contrived on a scale sufficient to incense any despotic lord of such a glorious milch-cow as Lombardy.  Unhappily the signora was more inspired by the remembrance of her husband than by consideration for her children.  She received disaffected persons:  she subscribed her money ostentatiously for notoriously patriotic purposes; and she who, in her father’s Como villa, had been a shy speechless girl, nothing more than beautiful, had become celebrated for her public letters, and the ardour of declamation against the foreigner which characterized her style.  In the face of such facts, the estates continued to be withheld from her governance.  Austria could do that:  she could wreak her spite against the woman, but she respected her own law even in a conquered land:  the estates were not confiscated, and not absolutely sequestrated; and, indeed, money coming from them had been sent to her for the education of her children.  It lay in unopened official envelopes, piled one upon another, quarterly remittances, horrible as blood of slaughter in her sight.  Count Serabiglione made a point of counting the packets always within the first five minutes of a visit to his daughter.  He said nothing, but was careful to see to the proper working of the lock of the cupboard where the precious deposits were kept, and sometimes in forgetfulness he carried off the key.  When his daughter reclaimed it, she observed, ’Pray believe me quite as anxious as yourself to preserve these documents.’  And the count answered, ’They represent the estates, and are of legal value, though the amount is small.  They represent your protest, and the admission of your claim.  They are priceless.’

In some degree, also, they compensated him for the expense he was put to in providing for his daughter’s subsistence and that of her children.  For there, at all events, visible before his eyes, was the value of the money, if not the money expended.  He remonstrated with Laura for leaving it more than necessarily exposed.  She replied,

‘My people know what that money means!’ implying, of course, that no one in her house would consequently touch it.  Yet it was reserved for the count to find it gone.