ed,
from sure that he dared himself so employ her. But on the morrow,
chancing to look from a window out of idle curiosity to see what horse
it was that was pacing in the street below, he beheld a man in a rich
cloak, in whom at once he recognized the Duke, and he accounted that the
dice of destiny had fallen.

Himself unseen by that horseman, Giovanni drew back quickly. On the spur
of the moment, he acted with a subtlety worthy of long premeditation.
Antonia and he were by an odd fatality alone together in that chamber of
the mezzanine. He turned to her.

"An odd fellow rides below here, tarrying as if expectant. I wonder
should you know who he is."

Obeying his suggestion, she rose--a tall, slim child of some eighteen
years, of a delicate, pale beauty, with dark, thoughtful eyes and long,
black tresses, interwoven with jewelled strands of gold thread. She
rustled to the window and looked down upon that cavalier; and, as she
looked, scanning him intently, the Duke raised his head. Their eyes met,
and she drew back with a little cry.

"What is it?" exclaimed Giovanni.

"It is that insolent fellow who stared at me last evening in the street.
I would you had not bidden me look."

Now, whilst she had been gazing from the window, Giovanni, moving softly
behind her, had espied a bowl of roses on the ebony table in the room's
middle. Swiftly and silently he had plucked a blossom, which he now held
behind his back. As she turned from him again, he sent it flying through
the window; and whilst in his heart he laughed with bitter hate and
scorn as he thought of Gandia snatching up that rose and treasuring it
in his bosom, aloud he laughed at her fears, derided them as idle.

That night, in his room, Giovanni practised penmanship assiduously,
armed with a model with which Antonia had innocently equipped him. He
went to bed well pleased, reflecting that as a man lives so does he die.
Giovanni Borgia, Duke of Gandia, had been ever an amiable profligate, a
heedless voluptuary obeying no spur but that of his own pleasure, which
should drive him now to his destruction. Giovanni Borgia, he considered
further, was, as he had expressed it, the very apple of his father's
eye; and since, of his own accord, the Duke had come to thrust his
foolish head into the noose, the Lord of Pesaro would make a sweet
beginning to the avenging of his wrongs by drawing it taut.

Next morning saw him at the Vatican, greatly daring, to deliver in