He was making a desperate effort to shake off this nightmare that beset him, to say to himself that he was but a fool, and that there was no cause for all this suffering which he was inflicting on his heart, nor for all these questions he had been asking of his intelligence.  It was surely not true!  He would laugh now, would laugh heartily within the next half hour with Corona herself, at the mere thought of supposing that she could love Gouache, Gouache, a painter!  Gouache, a Zouave!  Gouache, a contemptibly good-natured, harmless little foreigner!—­and Corona del Carmine, Duchessa d’Astrardente, Principessa di Sant’ Ilario, mother of all the Saracinesca yet to come!  It was better to laugh, truly, at such an absurd juxtaposition of ideas, of personalities, of high and low.  And Giovanni laughed, but the sound, was very harsh and died away without rousing one honest echo in the vaulted room.

Had Corona seen his face at that moment, or had she guessed what was passing in his mind, she would have sacrificed Faustina’s secret ten times over rather than let Giovanni suffer a moment longer as he was suffering now.  But Corona had no idea that he could put such a construction upon her doings.  He had shown her nothing of what he felt, except perhaps a slight annoyance at not being put in possession of the secret.  It was natural, she thought, that he should be a little out of temper, but as she saw no way of remedying the trouble except by exposing to him the innocent girl whom she had undertaken to protect, she held her peace and trusted that her husband’s displeasure would soon be past.  Had there been more time for reflection on the previous evening, in the interval between her learning from the porter that Giovanni knew of her absence, and her being confronted with Giovanni himself, she might have resolved to act differently; but having once made up her mind that he ought not to know the truth for the present, opposition only strengthened her determination.  There was nothing wrong in the course she was pursuing, or her conscience would have spoken and bidden her speak out.  Her nature was too like Giovanni’s own, proud, reserved, and outwardly cold, to yield any point easily.  It was her instinct, like his, to be silent rather than to speak, and to weigh considerations before acting upon them.  This very similarity of temper in the two rendered it certain that if they were ever opposed to each other the struggle would be a serious one.  They were both too strong to lead a life of petty quarrelling; if they ceased to live in perfect harmony they were only too sure to come to open hostility.  There is nothing which will wound pride and raise anger so inevitably as finding unexpected but determined opposition in those who very closely resemble ourselves.  In such a case a man cannot fall back upon the comfortable alternative of despising his enemy, since he has an intimate conviction that it would be paramount to despising himself; and if he is led into a pitched battle he will find his foe possessed of weapons which are exactly like his own.