doff it for all time, and
resume your true estate. Biancomonte, as I promised you, shall be yours
again. The Lord of Pesaro does not betray his word."

I smiled grimly at the pride of his utterance.

"It is an easy thing," said I, "freely to give that which is no longer
ours."

He coloured with the anger that was ever ready.

"What shall that mean?" he asked.

"Why, that in a few days you will have Cesare Borgia here, and you will
be Lord of Pesaro no more. I have saved your honour for you. More than
that it were idle to attempt."

"Think not that I shall submit," he cried. "I shall find in Italy the
help I need to return and drive the usurper out. You must have faith in
that, yourself, else had you never bargained with me as you have done
for the return of your Estates."

To that I answered nothing, but urged him to go below and show himself;
and the better that he might bear himself among his courtiers, I
detailed to him the most salient features of that fight.

He went, not without a certain uneasiness which, however, was soon
dispelled by the thunder of acclamation with which he was received; not
only by his courtiers, but by the soldiers who had fought in that hot
skirmish, and who believed that it was he had led them.

Meanwhile I sat above, in the closet he had vacated, and thence I
watched him, with such mingling feelings in my heart as baffle now my
halting pen. Scorn there was in my mood and a hot contempt of him
that he could stand there and accept their acclamation with an air of
humility that I am persuaded was assumed: a certain envious anger was
there, too, to think that such a weak-kneed, lily-livered craven should
receive the plaudits of the deeds that I, his buffoon, had performed for
him. Those acclamations were not for him, although those who acclaimed
him thought so. They were for the man who had routed Ramiro del' Orca
and his followers, and that man assuredly was I. Yet there I crouched
above, behind the velvet curtains where none might see me, whilst he
stood smiling and toying with his brown beard and listening to the fine
words of praise that, I could imagine, were falling from the lips of
Madonna Paola, who had drawn near and was speaking to him.

There is in my nature a certain love of effectiveness, a certain taste
for theatrical parade and the contriving of odd situations. This bent of
mine was whispering to me then to throw wide the window, and, stemming
their noisy plaudits, a