An evil thought crossed Giovanni’s mind.  He knew how Corona would suffer if she were not allowed either to see little Orsino or to know what became of him while she was living her solitary life of confinement in the mountains.  The diabolical cruelty of the idea fascinated him for a moment, and he looked coldly into her eyes as though he did not mean to answer her.  In spite of his new jealousy, however, he was not capable of inflicting this last blow.  As he looked at her beautiful white face and serious eyes, he wavered.  He loved her still and would have loved her, had the proofs against her been tenfold more convincing than they were.  With him his love was a passion apart and by itself.  It had been strengthened and made beautiful by the devotion and tenderness and faith which had grown up with it, and had surrounded it as with a wall.  But though all these things were swept away the passion itself remained, fierce, indomitable and soul-stirring in its power.  It stood alone, like the impregnable keep of a war-worn fortress, beneath whose shadow the outworks and ramparts have been razed to the ground, and whose own lofty walls are battered and dinted by engines of war, shorn of all beauty and of all its stately surroundings, but stern and unshaken yet, grim, massive and solitary.

For an instant Giovanni wavered, unable to struggle against that mysterious power which still governed him and forced him to acknowledge its influence.  The effort of resisting the temptation to be abominably cruel carried him back from his main purpose, and produced a sudden revulsion of feeling wholly incomprehensible to himself.

“Corona!” he cried, in a voice breaking with emotion.  He threw out his arms wildly and sprang towards her.  She thrust him back with a strength of which he would not have believed her capable.  Bitter words rose to her lips, but she forced them back and was silent, though her eyes blazed with an anger she had never felt before.  For some time neither spoke.  Corona stood erect and watchful, one hand resting upon the back of a chair.  Giovanni walked to the end of the room, and then came back and looked steadily into her face.  Several seconds elapsed before he could speak, and his face was very white.

“You may keep the child,” he said at last, in an unsteady tone.  Then without another word he left the room and softly closed the door behind him.

When Corona was alone she remained standing as he had last seen her, her gaze fixed on the heavy curtains through which he had disappeared.  Gradually her face grew rigid, and the expression vanished from her deep eyes, till they looked dull and glassy.  She tottered, lost her hold upon the chair and fell to the floor with an inarticulate groan.  There she lay, white, beautiful and motionless as a marble statue, mercifully unconscious, for a space, of all she had to suffer.