“Even if they fix this marriage on me,” she reflected, “and thus ruin my hopes of becoming a wealthy princess, they may not be able to discover that I had aught to do with the death of Gilardoni. How could they? Even if they find out I was in the neighborhood, who is to prove that, granting he did not die a natural death, he did not kill himself? The excitement of a painful interview might even bring on heart-disease. Twenty different reasons might explain and reconcile the facts of my being there with my perfect innocence of any complicity in his tragical fate. Shall I defy them all, and remain, or fly?” She paced to and fro distractedly. “I will remain here,” she at last defiantly decided. “If they accuse me of stealing the book, I will boldly declare that those three men have entered into a plot for extorting money from me--that _he_, Gilardoni, was the one who took it away, and that his lawyer pretended to find it here. No one saw him take it, though he threw it out of the window. I will swear he brought it hither, and offered to sell it to me; and tried to bully me with a threat of exposure as being the wife of that low-born peasant. I will risk staying. Let them do their worst--I think I can defy them. His highness will hasten to see me to-night, when he finds I am not at the opera: no doubt he will urge me, as he has so often done, to marry him, and I shall yield to his entreaties. I will no longer keep up my pretense of coyness and reluctance, but will use my influence over him to hurry on the marriage. Once his consort I am safe.” CHAPTER XXX. FREE AT LAST. Evil fate, which so often favors those who wish to follow the path leading to destruction, smiled on Lucia Guiscardini now as of yore. The inquest was held on her ill-fated husband about the hour when Frank Amberley discovered the record of that most miserable union that had caused his death. The inquiry was necessarily adjourned, however, to enable the medical men to examine the body more particularly. The emotion of Paul Desfrayne on reading the telegraphic account sent by the friend who had so heroically sacrificed his own feelings to a stern sense of duty may be in same measure imagined. To his overtaxed brain, the events of these last few days began to assume the aspect of a dream. Free! Quit of the consequences of those few months of infatuated folly! Oh! it could hardly be. No. Presently he must wake, and find it but a tantalizing vision of the night, as he had awakened many times before, thinking he had regained or had never lost his liberty. Only too well he knew he had never loved that remorseless woman, who would have sacrificed him for her own worldly gain, who had slain his happiness under the influence of her mistaken conception of his wealth and position.