icions did not entirely lack for grounds.

Giuliana flashed me a glance ere she made answer.

"You will tell my Lord Gambara that I have retired for the night and
that... But stay!" She caught up a quill and dipped it in the ink-horn,
drew paper to herself, and swiftly wrote three lines; then dusted it
with sand, and proffered that brief epistle to the servant.

"Give this to my lord."

Busio took the note, bowed, and departed.

After the door had closed a silence followed, in which I paced the room
in long strides, aflame now with the all-consuming fire of jealousy.
I do believe that Satan had set all the legions of hell to achieve my
overthrow that night. Naught more had been needed to undo me than this
spur of jealousy. It brought me now to her side. I stood over her,
looking down at her between tenderness and fierceness, she returning my
glance with such a look as may haunt the eyes of sacrificial victims.

"Why dared he come?" I asked.

"Perhaps... perhaps some affair connected with Astorre..." she faltered.

I sneered. "That would be natural seeing that he has sent Astorre to
Parma."

"If there was aught else, I am no party to it," she assured me.

How could I do other than believe her? How could I gauge the turpitude
of that beauty's mind--I, all unversed in the wiles that Satan teaches
women? How could I have guessed that when she saw Fifanti speak to that
lad at the gate that afternoon she had feared that he had set a spy upon
the house, and that fearing this she had bidden the Cardinal begone? I
knew it later. But not then.

"Will you swear that it is as you say?" I asked her, white with passion.

As I have said, I was standing over her and very close. Her answer now
was suddenly to rise. Like a snake came she gliding upwards into my arms
until she lay against my breast, her face upturned, her eyes languidly
veiled, her lips a-pout.

"Can you do me so great a wrong, thinking you love me, knowing that I
love you?" she asked me.

For an instant we swayed together in that sweetly hideous embrace. I was
as a man sapped of all strength by some portentous struggle. I trembled
from head to foot. I cried out once--a despairing prayer for help,
I think it was--and then I seemed to plunge headlong down through an
immensity of space until my lips found hers. The ecstasy, the living
fire, the anguish, and the torture of it have left their indelible scars
upon my memory. Even as I write the cruelly sweet po