do!"

Grifone set down his cup, ran forward and embraced her. "My lovely lady,
my adorable Molly!" he murmured, in a passion of admiration for her
transformed, unearthly beauty.

She noticed nothing of him or his doings, lay lax in his arms. She
stared, gulping down horror; she looked like some shocked Addolorata
come upon the body of her dead Son. And so, perhaps (since all good
women mother their lovers or lords), she was face to face with her dead.
Tears came to blot out her misery; she could not stay their fall. They
anointed also the burning cheeks of young Grifone, and drove him outside
himself with love. He kissed her softly again, with reverence, and
whispered--

"Courage, sweet lady; I shall be with you. I have it all in hand. The
end for you and me shall be happiness undreamed of yet. The Duke comes
in a quarter of an hour." Then he left her alone.

"The affair will go by clockwork," he assured himself. "Neither fast nor
slow, but by clockwork." He had an ingenious mind, and loved mechanics.

X

WITH ALL FAULTS

At the coming out from church the two Dukes (mentally at least)
separated; their paths coincided, but not their thoughts, nor their
behaviour. By common consent, as it appeared, Amilcare at once resumed
the obsequious, Cesare the overbearing part. Amilcare talked
profusively, smirked, grimaced, pranced by the other's side, writhed his
hands, in copious explanation of nothing at all. Cesare shrugged. The
amount of disdain an Italian can throw into a pair of dull eyes or an
irritable shoulder, the amount of it another will take without
swallowing, can still be studied whenever a young lieutenant of the line
sits down to breakfast in a tavern, and the waiter slaves for his penny
fee. Yet, depend upon it, the cringer has balanced to a nicety the
sweets and sours of boot-blacking against the _buona mano_; the rest is
pure commerce. So now, the deliberate insolence of the flushed Borgia
towards his host was a thing to be dumb at; yet Passavente redoubled his
volubility.

Going up the steps of the Palazzo Bagnacavallo, the guest plumply told
his entertainer to bring out the woman and go to the devil with his
cackling. Amilcare laughed all over his face at the best joke in the
world, and bowed to the earth. Thus humoured they went in to dinner.

Molly, in fold over fold of silk gauze which let every lovely limb be
seen as glorified in a rosy mist, met them in the ante-room, and
thenceforth