received an abrupt stir which
set a whirlpool of excitement in the Dead Sea of our lives. It was the
sudden reappearance of the Lord Giovanni.

He came alone, dust-stained and haggard, on a horse that dropped dead
from exhaustion the moment Pesaro was reached, and in his pallid cheek
and hollow eye we read the tale of some great fear and some disaster.

That night we heard the story of how he had performed the feat of riding
all the way from Rome in four-and-twenty hours, fleeing for his life
from the peril of assassination, of which Madonna Lucrezia had warned
him.

He went off to his Castle of Gradara, where he shut himself up with the
trouble we could but guess at, and so in Pesaro, that brief excitement
spent, we stagnated once again.

I seemed an anomaly in so gloomy a place, and more than once did I think
of departing and seeking out my poor old mother in her mountain home,
contenting myself hereafter with labouring like any honest villano born
to the soil. But there ever seemed to be a voice that bade me stay
and wait, and the voice bore a suggestion of Madonna Paola. But why
dissemble here? Why cast out hints of voices heard, supernatural in
their flavour? The voice, I doubt not, was just my own inclination,
which bade me hope that once again it might be mine to serve that lady.

An eventful year in the history of the families of Sforza and Borgia was
that year of grace 1497.

Spring came, and ere it had quite grown to summer we had news of the
assassination of the Duke of Gandia, and the tale that he was done to
death by his elder brother, Cesare Borgia; a tale which seemed to lack
for reasonable substantiation, and which, despite the many voices that
make bold to noise it broadcast, may or may not be true.

In that same month of June messages passed between Rome and Pesaro, and
gradually the burden of the messages leaked out in rumours that Pope
Alexander and his family were pressing the Lord Giovanni to consent to a
divorce. At last he left Pesaro again; this time to journey to Milan and
seek counsel with his powerful cousin, Lodovico, whom they called "The
Moor." When he returned he was more sulky and downcast than ever, and at
Gradara he lived in an isolation that had been worthy of a hermit.

And thus that miserable year wore itself out, and, at last, in December,
we heard that the divorce was announced, and that Lucrezia Borgia was
the Tyrant of Pesaro's wife no more. The news of it and the reason