She had only multiplied his motives for wishing to make her his wife. She understood him even less than he understood her. At no time before had her beauty made such a living appeal to him. Until now it had never been his privilege to behold her when emotion was at play. Her outward image of loveliness was all she had ever revealed to him. The voice she gave him in the past was not the passionate one he had just heard; the soul her eyes had mirrored was not the one that looked from them when she spoke the name of Mario Forza. The heave of her bosom, the come and go of carnation in her cheeks, the tides of tenderness that rose amid her promises of a vehement strength, portrayed to him a Hera he had not known before--a woman he would have given all his vast fortune to win. “What you have said does not deter me,” he told her, “though I apprehend the situation as fully as you wish me to. I accept.” And thus the thread of the story took a new twist, but one of which Aunt Beatrice never learned, nor did Don Riccardo. CHAPTER VIII A WEDDING JOURNEY AT noon they kneeled before the Cardinal of Milan, in the great white cathedral, speaking the words that welded their bonds. It was an hour of gray skies, and the many-hued sunshine that often had sifted through the great stained glass windows to felicitate a bride did not fall upon Hera. The gay world of Lombardy was there, filling the transept with its silks and jewels, and in the backward parts of the nave and aisles common folk looked on at the famous wedding. There was to be a breakfast in Villa Barbiondi, and when the ceremony at the altar was over some of the princes and dukes and marquises, with their dames, followed Tarsis and his bride to the main door. In the journals of that evening were the names of the ladies and gentlemen who composed the brilliant procession, with details, more or less accurate, as to the gowns. Other particulars of the event, within the cathedral and without, were set down minutely by press men and press women. They told of the concourse of people in the square--hundreds of them idle working folk; how they crowded the steps before the church, and how the Civil Guards kept open a lane to the carriages of the bridal party; but no mention was made of the sullen faces bordering that lane.