oly Father?"

"Kill him?" Giovanni laughed shortly, scornfully. "Do the dead suffer?"

"In hell, sometimes," said the Cardinal.

"Perhaps. But I want to be sure. I want sufferings that I can witness,
sufferings that I can employ as balsam for my own wounded honour. I
shall strike, even as he has stricken me--at his soul, not at his body.
I shall wound him where he is most sensitive."

Ascanio Sforza, towering tall and slender in his scarlet robes, shook
his head slowly.

"All this is madness--madness! You were best away, best in Pesaro.
Indeed, you cannot safely show your face in Rome."

"That is why I go masked. That is why I come to you, my lord, for
shelter here until--"

"Here?" The Cardinal was instantly alert. "Then you think I am as mad as
yourself. Why, man, if so much as a whisper of your presence in Rome got
abroad, this is the first place where they would look nor you. If you
will have your way, if you are so set on the avenging of past wrongs
and the preventing of future ones, it is not for me, your kinsman,
to withstand you. But here in my palace you cannot stay, for your own
safety's sake. That page who brought you, now; I would not swear he did
not see the arms upon your ring. I pray that he did not. But if he did,
your presence is known here already."

Giovanni was perturbed.

"But if not here, where, then, in Rome should I be safe?"

"Nowhere, I think," answered the ironical Ascanio. "Though perhaps you
might count yourself safe with Pico. Your common hate of the Holy Father
should be a stout bond between you."

Fate prompted the suggestion. Fate drove the Lord of Pesaro to act
upon it, and to seek out Antonio Maria Pico, Count of Mirandola, in his
palace by the river, where Pico, as Ascanio had foreseen, gave him a
cordial welcome.

There he abode almost in hiding until the end of May, seldom issuing
forth, and never without his mask--a matter this which excited no
comment, for masked faces were common in the streets of Rome in the
evening of the fifteenth century. In talk with Pico he set forth
his intent, elaborating what already he had told the Cardinal
Vice-Chancellor.

"He is a father--this Father of Fathers," he said once. "A tender,
loving father whose life is in his children, who lives through them
and for them. Deprive him of them, and his life would become empty,
worthless, a living death. There is Giovanni, who is as the apple of his
eye, whom he has created Duke of Gandia,