to pursue his wooing like a clown, the high-spirited daughter of Urbino
promised herself that in like fashion would she deal with him.

Swinging herself free from his grasp a second time, she caught him a
stinging buffet on the ducal cheek which--so greatly did it take him by
surprise--all but sent him sprawling.

"Madonna!" he panted. "This indignity to me!"

"And what indignities have not I suffered at your hands?" she retorted,
with a fierceness of glance before which he recoiled. And as she now
towered before him, a beautiful embodiment of wrath, he knew not whether
he loved her more than he feared her, yet the desire to possess her and
to tame her was strong within him.

"Am I a baggage of your camps," she questioned furiously, "to be so
handled by you? Do you forget that I am the niece of Guidobaldo, a lady
of the house of Rovere, and that from my cradle I have known naught but
the respect of all men, be they born never so high? That to such by my
birth I have the right? Must I tell you in plain words, sir, that though
born to a throne, your manners are those of a groom? And must I tell
you, ere you will realise it, that no man to whom with my own lips I
have not given the right, shall set hands upon me as you have done?"

Her eyes flashed, her voice rose, and higher raged the storm; and Gian
Maria was so tossed and shattered by it that he could but humbly sue for
pardon.

"What shall it signify that I am a Duke," he pleaded timidly, "since
I am become a lover? What is a Duke then? He is but a man, and as the
meanest of his subjects his love must take expression. For what does
love know of rank?"

She was moving towards the window again, and for all that he dared not a
second time arrest her by force, he sought by words to do so.

"Madonna," he exclaimed, "I implore you to hear me. In another hour I
shall be in the saddle, on my way to Babbiano."

"That, sir," she answered him, "is the best news I have heard since your
coming." And without waiting for his reply, she stepped through the open
window on to the terrace.

For a second he hesitated, a sense of angry humiliation oppressing his
wits. Then he started to follow her; but as he reached the window the
little crook-backed figure of Ser Peppe stood suddenly before him with a
tinkle of bells, and a mocking grin illumining his face.

"Out of the way, fool," growled the angry Duke. But the odd figure in
its motley of red and black continued where it s