gar opinion.
In thought she had been his for a year; and in the mind he lived most
deliciously. It was, no doubt, his full intent to make her his in all
the grossness of the fact, but not until he had got rid of Amilcare, or
induced Amilcare to get rid of himself. This was what the stiffnecked
Condottiere was now doing as fast as his best enemies could have wished.
His people hated him so bitterly that he would certainly have worn
mail--had not Molly been his mail. They spared him because they loved
her, and believed that he still had her heart. "Amilcar, uxoris gratia,
Dux," was now the fact. Grifone could have destroyed belief and him
together by a lift of the eyebrow; but he wanted more than that, so
waited on.

The little fellow was really extraordinary. Luxurious as he was to the
root, and effeminate; hating as he did cold water, cold food, the cold
shoulder; one and all of these shuddering things he had schooled himself
to bear without a blink. He grew even to take a stern pleasure in the
bitterness they cost him, as he turned them to his uses and reckoned up
his balance at the bank. Amilcare snarled at him, cut his words out of
his mouth, struck him, kicked him once like a yard-dog. Grifone added it
all to his store.

But as the day for Duke Cesare's visit drew near, Molly began to be much
again in her husband's thoughts--how far she would go in this maturer
time. She had charmed the man once before, at Foligno; she had charmed
everybody. But then she had been charmed herself. Subsequently she had
charmed Bentivoglio, not so happily but that she endangered her own
spell. That was the present trouble, for hitherto her charm had lain
precisely in herself, in the little everyday acts which were her own
nature. Bentivoglio had reasonably wanted more: so would Borgia want
very much more. Could Molly be brought, not to surrender all he wanted,
but to make him want? Amilcare, growing tense between his difficulties,
felt that explanations must be given and received, felt also that they
must come from himself--in fact, Grifone had declined them--and felt
that he was not strong in such work. Direction he could give, but not
explanation. However, he must try.

On a vivid morning of early summer, when the lemon-trees in the
_cortile_ looked as if they had been cut out of metal, and the planes
and very poplars were unwinking in the thick blue air, Amilcare came
into his wife's room. She had not expected him; he found her l