nced about the room. He looked at the delicate adornment of the
walls, the curtains of Lyons damask, the crystal girandoles, the toys in
porcelain of Saxony and Sevres, in bronze and ivory and Chinese lacquer,
crowding the tables and cabinets of inlaid wood. Overhead floated a rosy
allegory by Luca Giordano; underfoot lay a carpet of the royal
manufactory of France; and through the open windows he heard the plash
of the garden fountains and saw the alignment of the long green alleys
set with the statues of Roman patriots.

"Then," said he--and the words sounded strangely in his own ears--"then
they may take it from us some day--and all this with it, to the very toy
you are playing with."

She rose, and from her fullest height dropped a brilliant smile on him;
then her eyes turned to the portrait of the great fighting Duke set in
the monumental stucchi of the chimney-piece.

"If you take after your ancestors you will know how to defend it," she
said.

4.3.

The new Duke sat in his closet. The walls had been stripped of their
pious relics and lined with books, and above the fireplace hung the
Venus of Giorgione, liberated at last from her long imprisonment. The
windows stood open, admitting the soft September air. Twilight had
fallen on the gardens, and through it a young moon floated above the
cypresses.

On just such an evening three years earlier he had ridden down the slope
of the Monte Baldo with Fulvia Vivaldi at his side. How often, since, he
had relived the incidents of that night! With singular precision they
succeeded each other in his thoughts. He felt the wild sweep of the
storm across the lake, the warmth of her nearness, the sense of her
complete trust in him; then their arrival at the inn, the dazzle of
light as they crossed the threshold, and de Crucis confronting them
within. He heard her voice pleading with him in every accent that pride
and tenderness and a noble loyalty could command; he felt her will
slowly dominating his, like a supernatural power forcing him into his
destined path; he felt--and with how profound an irony of spirit!--the
passion of self-dedication in which he had taken up his task.

He had known moments of happiness since; moments when he believed in
himself and in his calling, and felt himself indeed the man she thought
him. That was in the exaltation of the first months, when his
opportunities had seemed as boundless as his dreams, and he had not yet
learned that the sov