tleness that
in the past he had rarely manifested for me, he asked me was I skilled
in writing verse. There were not wanting others to whom he might have
gone, for there was no lack of rhymsters about his Court; but perhaps he
thought he could be more certain of my silence than of theirs.

I answered him that were the subject to my taste, I might succeed in
throwing off some passable lines upon it. He pressed gold upon me, and
bade me there and then set about fashioning an ode to Madonna Paola, and
to forget, when they were done, under pain of a whipping to the bone,
that I had written them.

I obeyed him with a right good-will. For what subject of all subjects
possible was there that made so powerful an appeal to my inclinations?
Within an hour he had the ode--not perhaps such a poem as might stand
comparison with the verses of Messer Petrarca, yet a very passable
effusion, chaste of conceit and palpitating with sincerity and
adoration. It was in that that I addressed her as the "Holy Flower of
the Quince," which was the symbol of the House of Santafior.

So great an impression made that ode that on the morrow the Lord
Giovanni came to me with a second bribe and a second threat of torture.
I gave him a sonnet of Petrarchian manner which went near to outshining
the merits of the ode. And now, these requests of the Lord Giovanni's
assumed an almost daily regularity, until it came to seem that did
affairs continue in this manner for yet a little while, I should have
earned me enough to have repurchased Biancomonte, and, so, ended my
troubles. And good was the value that I gave him for his gold. How good,
he never knew; for how was he, the clod, to guess that this despised
jester of his Court was pouring out his very soul into the lines he
wrote to the tyrant's orders?

It is scant wonder that, at last, Madonna Paola who had begun by
smiling, was touched and moved by the ardent worship that sighed from
those perfervid verses. So touched, indeed, was she as to believe the
Lord Giovanni's love to be the pure and holy thing those lines presented
it, and to conclude that his love had wrought in him a wondrous and
ennobling transformation. That so she thought I have the best of all
reasons to affirm, for I had it from her very lips one day.

"Lazzaro," she sighed, "it is occurring to me that I have done the Lord
Giovanni an injustice. I have misgauged his character. I held him to
be a shallow, unlettered clown, devoid of a