Bianca withdrew her hand. "Yes," she said; "I quite understand. I have always understood." Then, wishing her step-mother good-night, she bent down and kissed her, and passed into her own room, gently closing both of the double set of doors which separated the two apartments.
She had not been in bed long before sleep came to her, for she was, in fact, more weary in body and mind than she had realized. For four or five hours she slept soundly enough, but after that her slumbers became disturbed by dreams. She dreamed that Silvio was near her, that she could see him but could not speak to him, and that he had some message for her, some letter which the Abbé Roux was trying to take from him. In her sleep she seemed to hear strange noises and her own name called softly at intervals. Suddenly she awoke with a start. A gleam of moonlight was shining through the window-curtains and half-closed _persiennes_. It made a broad track across the floor to the wall opposite her bed, and fell on the face of a picture hanging near the corner of the room--a portrait of that very Cardinal Acorari who had caused the Renaissance palace to be added to the Montefiano fortress, in order that he might have a villa in the Sabine Mountains in which to pass the hot summer months away from Rome. The moonlight glanced upon his scarlet robes and skull-cap and on his heavy countenance. Time had caused the flesh colors to fade, and the full mouth, with the sensual lips, looked unnaturally red against the waxy whiteness of the rest of the face.
Bianca lay and looked at the streak of moonlight on the floor. Presently her gaze followed the track until it rested on the picture. For some moments she looked at the portrait with a certain fascination. She had never seen it in the moonlight before; it looked ghostly. She had once seen a cardinal lying in state when she was a child, and the sight had frightened her. She was not at all frightened now, for she was no longer a child; but all the same, she could not take her eyes off the picture. She found herself wondering what relation she was to that old Cardinal Acorari--great-great-what? Granddaughter would not do, for cardinals, of course, never had children; certainly not cardinal-priests; and Cardinal Acorari had been bishop of Ostia and cardinal vicar of Rome.