For, on the stroke of noon on that day, she learned that her sister had become the legal wife of Charles of Durazzo, having been publicly married to him at an altar erected in the open air and in sight of all the people before the church of Saint John by the Sea, not a bowshot distant from the great gates of the Palazzo Durazzo. The marriage had been solemnized by Duke Charles’s chaplain, the necessary dispensation for the marriage of cousins, one of them being a minor, having been received from Rome the day before; and, at its conclusion, the newly-wedded pair had faced the spectators hand in hand, and had solemnly declared that they took one another as husband and wife, calling upon God and the people to bear witness to it. Their announcement had been acclaimed with tumultuous vociferations of applause and delight; after which the Duke and Duchess of Durazzo received the Papal benediction, prior to being escorted in procession round the city by their men-at-arms and the sympathetic populace to the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets. So that Charles of Durazzo was now the husband—and, it need hardly be said, the master—of the thirteen-year-old heir to the throne. And when, after curbing the useless rage in her heart, Joan summoned the pair to receive her congratulations, she realized her folly in quarrelling with that all-daring and remorseless man; also she understood that nothing short of the throne itself—let the price be what it might—would ever satisfy his lust of power and glory and hate. Thenceforth the temptation of Joan to be in very truth at once the real ruler of her own dominions and at the same time the arbiter of her own destiny increased and grew to terrific powers; the desire to satisfy her wishes absolutely in everything became a kind of diabolical possession, sweeping away every consideration of virtue and of mere worldly prudence; save only when, in rare intervals of reaction, she would fall upon her knees in the solitude of her chamber, her face in her hands, sobbing as though her heart would break with the horror of her situation. CHAPTER XII A MEDIÆVAL NIGHTMARE