later he sent me
another score of lances--for he kept his forces scattered about the
country whilst gradually he increased their numbers.

Thereafter we waited for events at Pagliano, the drawbridge raised, and
none entering save after due challenge.

We expected an attack which never came; for Pier Luigi did not dare to
lead an army against an Imperial fief upon such hopeless grounds as were
his own. Possibly, too, Galeotto's memorial may have caused the Pope to
impose restraint upon his dissolute son.

Cosimo d'Anguissola, however, had the effrontery to send a messenger a
week later to Pagliano, to demand the surrender of his wife, saying
that she was his by God's law and man's, and threatening to enforce his
rights by an appeal to the Vatican.

That we sent the messenger empty-handed away, it is scarce necessary to
chronicle. I was in command at Pagliano, holding it in Bianca's name,
as Bianca's lieutenant and castellan, and I made oath that I would never
lower the bridge to admit an enemy.

But Cosimo's message aroused in us a memory that had lain dormant these
days. She was no longer for my wooing. She was the wife of another.

It came to us almost as a flash of lightning in the night; and it
startled us by all that it revealed.

"The fault of it is all mine," said she, as we sat that evening in the
gold-and-purple dining-room where we had supped.

It was with those words that she broke the silence that had endured
throughout the repast, until the departure of the pages and the
seneschal who had ministered to us precisely as in the days when
Cavalcanti had been alive.

"Ah, not that, sweet!" I implored her, reaching a hand to her across the
table.

"But it is true, my dear," she answered, covering my hand with her own.
"If I had shown you more mercy when so contritely you confessed your
sin, mercy would have been shown to me. I should have known from the
sign I had that we were destined for each other; that nothing that you
had done could alter that. I did know it, and yet..." She halted there,
her lip tremulous.

"And yet you did the only thing that you could do when your sweet purity
was outraged by the knowledge of what I really had been."

"But you were so no more," she said with a something of pleading in her
voice.

"It was you--the blessed sight of you that cleansed me," I cried. "When
love for you awoke in me, I knew love for the first time, for that other
thing which I deemed love had none