most noble entertainment.

His position was perilous and precarious in the extreme, and it needed
all his strength of character to hold in curb the resentment that boiled
within him to see himself thus preyed upon; and that was not the
worst. The worst was Pier Luigi's ceaseless attentions to Bianca,
the attentions of the satyr for the nymph, a matter in which I think
Cavalcanti suffered little less than did I.

He hoped for the best, content to wait until cause for action should
be forced upon him. And meanwhile that courtly throng took its ease at
Pagliano. The garden that hitherto had been Bianca's own sacred domain,
the garden into which I had never yet dared set foot, was overrun now
by the Duke's gay suite--a cloud of poisonous butterflies. There in the
green, shaded alleys they disported themselves; in the lemon-grove,
in the perfumed rose-garden, by hedges of box and screens of purple
clematis they fluttered.

Bianca sought to keep her chamber in those days, and kept it for as
long on each day as was possible to her. But the Duke, hobbling on
the terrace--for as a consequence of his journey on horseback he had
developed a slight lameness, being all rotten with disease--would grow
irritable at her absence, and insistent upon her presence, hinting that
her retreat was a discourtesy; so that she was forced to come forth
again, and suffer his ponderous attentions and gross flatteries.

And three days later there came another to Pagliano, bidden thither by
the Duke, and this other was none else than my cousin Cosimo, who now
called himself Lord of Mondolfo, having been invested in that tyranny,
as I have said.

On the morning after his arrival we met upon the terrace.

"My saintly cousin!" was his derisive greeting. "And yet another change
in you--out of sackcloth into velvet! The calendar shall know you as St.
Weathercock, I think--or, perhaps, St. Mountebank."

What followed was equally bitter and sardonic on his part, fiercely and
openly hostile on mine. At my hostility he had smiled cruelly.

"Be content with what is, my strolling saint," he said, in the tone of
one who gives a warning, "unless you would be back in your hermitage, or
within the walls of some cloister, or even worse. Already have you found
it a troublesome matter to busy yourself with the affairs of the world.
You were destined for sanctity." He came closer, and grew very fierce.
"Do not put it upon me to make a saint of you by sending yo