of his voice.

"Ah, never look so glum," she cried, smiling now at his crestfallen air.
"If I have not hearkened now, I will again. Forgive me, good Gonzaga,"
she begged him, with a sweetness no man could have resisted. And then a
sigh fluttered from her lips; a sound that was like a sob came after it,
and her hand closed upon his arm.

"They are breaking my heart, my friend. Oh, that you had left me at
peace in the Convent of Santa Sofia!"

He turned to her, all solicitude and gentleness, to inquire the reason
of her outburst.

"It is this odious alliance into which they seek to force me with that
man from Babbiano. I have told Guidobaldo that I will not wed this Duke.
But as profitably might I tell Fate that I will not die. The one is as
unheeding as the other."

Gonzaga sighed profoundly, in sympathy, but said nothing.

Here was a grief to which he could not minister, a grievance that
he could do nothing to remove. She turned from him with a gesture of
impatience.

"You sigh," she exclaimed, "and you bewail the cruelty of the fate in
store for me. But you can do nothing for me. You are all words, Gonzaga.
You can call yourself more than my friend--my very slave. Yet, when I
need your help, what do you offer me? A sigh!"

"Madonna, you are unjust," he was quick to answer, with some heat. "I
did not dream--I did not dare to dream--that it was my help you sought.
My sympathy, I believed, was all that you invited, and so, lest I should
seem presumptuous, it was all I offered. But if my help you need; if you
seek a means to evade this alliance that you rightly describe as odious,
such help as it lies in a man's power to render shall you have from me."

He spoke almost fiercely and with a certain grim confidence, for all
that as yet no plan had formed itself in his mind.

Indeed, had a course been clear to him, there had been perhaps less
confidence in his tone, for, after all, he was not by nature a man
of action, and his character was the very reverse of valiant. Yet so
excellent an actor was he as to deceive even himself by his acting, and
in this suggestion of some vague fine deeds that he would do, he felt
himself stirred by a sudden martial ardour, and capable of all. He was
stirred, too, by the passion with which Valentina's beauty filled
him--a passion that went nearer to making a man of him than Nature had
succeeded in doing.

That now, in the hour of her need, she should turn so readily to him for