tern
tones of the Court of Jeanne de Valois.

And so it may well be that they loved, and that they were blessed in
their love for the little space allotted them in each other's company.
The sequel justifies in a measure the assumption. Just one little summer
out of the span of their lives--brief though those lives were--did they
spend together, and it is good to find some little evidence that, during
that brief season at least, they inhabited life's rose-garden.

In September--just four short months after the wedding-bells had pealed
above them--the trumpets of war blared out their call to arms. Louis's
preparations for the invasion of Milan were complete and he poured his
troops through Piedmont under the command of Giangiacomo Trivulzio.

Cesare was to accompany Louis into Italy. He appointed his
seventeen-year-old duchess governor and administrator of his lands and
lordships in France and Dauphiny under a deed dated September 8, and
he made her heiress to all his moveable possessions in the event of his
death. Surely this bears some witness, not only to the prevailing of
a good understanding between them, but to his esteem of her and the
confidence he reposed in her mental qualities. The rest her later
mourning of him shows.

Thus did Cesare take leave of the young wife whom he was never to see
again. Their child--born in the following spring--he was never to see at
all. The pity of it! Ambition-driven, to fulfil the destiny expected of
him, he turned his back upon that pleasant land of Dauphiny where the
one calm little season of his manhood had been spent, where happiness
and peace might have been his lifelong portion had he remained. He set
his face towards Italy and the storm and stress before him, and in the
train of King Louis he set out upon the turbulent meteoric course that
was to sear so deep and indelible a brand across the scroll of history.

CHAPTER II. THE KNELL OF THE TYRANTS

In the hour of his need Lodovico Sforza found himself without friends
or credit, and he had to pay the price of the sly, faithless egotistical
policy he had so long pursued with profit.

His far-reaching schemes were flung into confusion because a French king
had knocked his brow against a door, and had been succeeded by one who
conceived that he had a legal right to the throne of Milan, and the
intent and might to enforce it, be the right legal or not. It was in
vain now that Lodovico turned to the powers of Italy