saro. I am here to serve you
to the utmost of my power, Madonna, and the only doubt that assails me
is that my power may be all too small for the service that you need."

"Is its nature known to you?" she asked in wonder. Then, ere I had
answered, she bade me rise, and with her own hand assisted me.

"I have guessed it," answered I, "guided by such scraps of information
as from your messenger I gleaned. It concerns, unless I err, the Lord
Ignacio Borgia."

"Your wits have lost nothing of their quickness," she said, with a sad
smile, "and I doubt me you know all."

"The only thing I did not know your brother has just told me--that
you are to be wed before Christmas. He has ordered me to write your
epithalamium."

She drew into step beside me, and we slowly paced the alley side by
side, and, as we went, withered leaves overhead, and withered leaves to
make a carpet for our fret, she told me in her own way more or less
what I have set down, even to her brother's self-seeking share in the
transaction that she dubbed hideous and abhorrent.

She was little changed, this winsome lady in the time that was sped. She
was in her twenty-first year, but in reality she seemed to me no older
than she had been on that day when first I saw her arguing with her
grooms upon the road to Cagli. And from this I reassured myself that she
had not been fretted overmuch by the absence of the Lord Giovanni.

Presently she spoke of him and of her plighted word which her brother
and those supple gentlemen of the House of Borgia were inducing her to
dishonour.

"Once before, in a case almost identical, when all seemed lost, you
came--as if Heaven directed--to my rescue. This it is that gives me
confidence in such aid as you might lend me now."

"Alas! Madonna," I sighed, "but the times are sorely changed and the
situations with them. What is there now that I can do?"

"What you did then. Take me beyond their reach."

"Ah! But whither?"

"Whither but to the Lord Giovanni? Is it not to him that my troth is
plighted?"

I shook my head in sorrow, a thrust of jealousy cutting me the while.

"That may not be," said I. "It were not seemly, unless the Lord Giovanni
were here himself to take you hence."

"Then I will write to the Lord Giovanni," she cried. "I will write, and
you shall bear my letter."

"What think you will the Lord Giovanni do?" I burst out, with a scorn
that must have puzzled her. "Think you his safety does not give him