things serve your Grace," said she,
with a curtsy. She kissed him again, and then Amilcare took her away.

The Borgia wrote sonnets that night.

"Mollavella, pearl of ladies," whispered her ardent husband, when they
were on the North Road and in the thick of the violet Roman night,
"never have I felt such joy in you as this day." He looked up at the
massed company of the stars. "Fiery in all that galaxy, yonder I see my
own star!" he cried in a transport. "Behold, it points us dead to the
North. O Star, lit by a star! 'Tis you have set it burning clear, my
glorious Princess."

"Dearest heart, I shall die of love," sighed swooning Molly, out of
herself at such praise. "But indeed I have done little enough for you as
yet."

"More than you think, or can dream," he answered, and spoke truly; for
the girl saw nothing in their late visit but a civility done to a great
lord.

"If the Duke comes to Nona, Amilcare, I will try to put him at his
ease," she said after a little.

"Try, try, dear soul; it is all that I wish."

"He seemed not so to me when first we went to him, Amilcare."

Amilcare shrugged. "Eh, per la Madonna--!" he began, as who should say,
"Being known for his brother's butcher, how should he be?" But he stayed
in time. "He has many enemies," he added quietly.

IV

MARKET OVERT

Nona, little city of domes and belfries and square loggias, all in a
cluster behind brown walls; with gates of Roman masonry, stolid Lombard
church, a piazza of colonnades and restless poplar trees; of a splayed
fountain where the Three Graces, back to back, spurt water from their
breasts of bronze--Nona, in our time, is not to be discerned from the
railway, although you may see its ranked mulberry-trees and fields of
maize, and guess its pleasant seat in the plain well enough. It is about
the size of Parma, a cheerful, leisurely place, abounding in shade and
deep doorways and _cafes_, having some thirty churches (mostly baroque),
a fine Palazzo della Ragione in the principal square, and the remains of
a cathedral of the ninth century glooming behind a monstrous facade of
the seventeenth, all whitewash, cornucopias, and sprawling Apostles.
Thus it seems now to the strayed traveller who, breaking his journey at
Castel Bolognese, simmers for four hours in an omnibus along with
priests, flies, fleas, and old women. The _cortege_ from Papal territory
saw a vastly different city of it when it approached the gates in the