ath of Cesare
Borgia--an unlikely event, for they say he uses great precautions.
Saving the miracle, and providing Cesare lives, I will give the Lord
Giovanni's reign in Pesaro at most two months."

We had halted now, and were confronting each other in the descending
gloom.

"Lazzaro, dear friend," she cried, almost with gaiety, "I was wise to
take counsel with you. You have planted in my heart a very vigorous
growth of hope."

We turned soon after, and started to retrace our steps, for she might be
ill-advised to remain absent overlong.

I left her on the terrace in a very different spirit from that in which
she had come to me, bearing with me her promise that she would act as I
had advised her. No doubt I had taken a load from her gentle soul, and
oddly enough I had taken, too, a load from mine.

Things fell out as I said they would in far as Giovanni Sforza and
Filippo were concerned. Madonna's seeming amenability to their wishes
stayed their insistence, and they could but respect her wishes to let
the betrothal be delayed yet a little while. And during the weeks that
followed, it was I scarce know whether more pitiable or more amusing
to see the efforts that Giovanni made to win her ardently desired
affection.

Love has sharp eyes at times, and a dullard under the influence of the
baby god will turn shrewd and exert rare wiles in the conduct of his
wooing. Giovanni, by some intuition usually foreign to his dull nature,
seemed to divine what manner of man would be Madonna Paola's ideal, and
strove to pass himself off as possessed of the attributes of that ideal,
with an ardour that was pitiably comical. He became an actor by the side
of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were
the merest bunglers with the art. He gathered that Madonna Paola loved
the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, he
became a poet for the season.

"Poeta nascitur" the proverb runs, and that proverb's truth was
doubtless forced home upon the Lord Giovanni at an early stage of his
excursions into the flowery meads of prosody. Fortunately he lacked the
supreme vanity that is the attribute of most poetasters, and he was able
to see that such things as after hours of midnight-labour he contrived
to pen, would evoke nothing but her amusement--unless, indeed, it were
her scorn--and render him the laughing-stock of all his Court.

So, in the wisdom of despair, he came to me, and with a gen