no
longer needed. Extortion had reduced them to poverty and despair and
their very houses were being pulled down to supply material for the new
citadel, the Duke recking little who might thus be left without a roof
over his head.

"He has gone mad," said Galeotto, and laughed. "Pier Luigi could not
more effectively have played his part so as to serve our ends. The
nobles he alienated long ago, and now the very populace is incensed
against him and weary of his rapine. It is so bad with him that of late
he has remained shut in the citadel, and seldom ventures abroad, so as
to avoid the sight of the starving faces of the poor and the general
ruin that he is making of that fair city. He has given out that he is
ill. A little blood-letting will cure all his ills for ever."

Upon the morrow Galeotto picked thirty of his men, and gave them
their orders. They were to depose their black liveries, and clad as
countryfolk, but armed as countryfolk would be for a long journey, they
were severally to repair afoot to Piacenza, and assemble there upon the
morning of Saturday at the time and place he indicated. They went, and
that afternoon we followed.

"You will come back to me, Agostino?" Bianca said to me at parting.

"I will come back," I answered, and bowing I left her, my heart very
heavy.

But as we rode the prospect of the thing to do warmed me a little, and
I shook off my melancholy. Optimism coloured the world for me all of the
rosy hue of promise.

We slept in Piacenza that night, in a big house in the street that leads
to the Church of San Lazzaro, and there was a company of perhaps a
dozen assembled there, the principals being the brothers Pallavicini
of Cortemaggiore, who had been among the first to feel the iron hand of
Pier Luigi; there were also present Agostino Landi, and the head of the
house of Confalonieri.

We sat after supper about a long table of smooth brown oak, which
reflected as in a pool the beakers and flagons with which it was
charged, when suddenly Galeotto span a coin upon the middle of it. It
fell flat presently, showing the ducal arms and the inscription of which
the abbreviation PLAC was a part.

Galeotto set his finger to it. "A year ago I warned him," said he, "that
his fate was written there in that shortened word. To-morrow I shall
read the riddle for him."

I did not understand the allusion and said so.

"Why," he explained, not only to me but to others whose brows had also
been k