welcome, overcame policy by having none,
led captivity captive. Amilcare might hover behind her with plots, a
delighted and forgotten shade: Molly Lovel of Bankside was Duchess of
Nona, and might have been Queen of Italy, if all Italy had stood in the
Piazza Grande. She was throned at a banquet, escorted home by the
Signoria bareheaded; she was serenaded all night by relays of citizens,
by straining poets, by all kinds of music. She had not a wink of sleep
till morning, nor the faintest idea what it was all about.

There was no withstanding the popular voice; the Nonesi went mad to be a
Duchy, with Molly for Duchess. Amilcare might be thrown in. They
besieged the Bagnacavallo _Cortile_; they wrote sonnets and madrigals,
and sang them day in, day out. Amilcare, acting with admirable
discretion, kept very much to himself; he sent his beautiful wife on to
the balcony twice a day to be saluted, and (more sparingly) let her work
for him among the higher sort with her lips, her blushes, and her
friendly grey eyes. He was humble in the Council, sober beneath the
heaped-up honours of the popular voice, stern only with his mercenaries.
A fortnight of this swept him to the top of his hopes. A deputation,
with a laurel crown and the title of _Dux_ in a casket, waited upon him.
He had expected it for a week, and carefully dragooned his Molly.

"I must refuse the thing," he told her, "for your dear sake, my angel.
The fatigues, the affairs of a Ruler of State are incredible. I will
never let you bear them. The signori may pluck their beards out by the
roots. I am resolved." Molly wept to hear him.

When the great morning came--a luminous April day of showers and warm
wind--he was as good as his word. Molly, shining with pride in him
(herself wearing the day's "uncertain glory"), saw him fold his arms in
face of the pompous line of men his seniors, compress his mouth, shake
his cropped head. The deputation was much taken aback, the crowd drove
hither and thither; she saw head turned to head, guessed at wounds which
certainly any one there was incapable of feeling. She, however, felt
them, rose up from her chair, laid a hand upon her lord's arm: they saw
her plead with him. Oh, lovely sight! with her they too began to plead:
"Pieta di Nona, Signore! Pieta di noi, Madonna!" She was their graceful
choragus; or rather, she, like some slim daughter of the
Greeks--Iphigenia or another--voiced the protagonist's part; and they
wailed afte