But in her love for Gianbattista she was fixed and determined.

It would have been more easy to turn her father from his ideas than to make Lucia give up the man she loved.

When Marzio had suddenly declared that she should marry the lawyer, her first feeling had been one of ungovernable anger which had soon found vent in tears.

During the night she had thought the matter over, and had come to the conclusion that it was only an evil jest, invented by Marzio to give her pain.

But in the morning it seemed to her as though on the far horizon a black cloud of possible trouble were gathering; she had admitted to herself that her father might be in earnest, and she had felt something like the anticipation of the great struggle of her life.