.

"That," she answered, "is as shall be decreed by me or him."

He breathed sharply, and his voice hardened beyond belief in one usually
so gentle of tone and manner.

"Be warned, Madonna," he muttered, coming so close that with the
slightest swaying she must touch him, "that if this nameless sbirro
shall ever dare to stand 'twixt you and me, by God and His saints, I'll
kill him! Be warned, I say."

And the door re-opening at that moment, he fell back, bowed, and
brushing past the entering ladies, gained the threshold. Here someone
tugged at the prodigious foliated sleeves that spread beside him on the
air like the wings of a bird. He turned, and saw Peppino motioning him
to lower his head.

"A word in your ear, Magnificent. There was a man once went out for wool
that came back shorn."

Angrily cuffing the fool aside, he was gone.

Valentina sank down upon her window-seat, in a turmoil of mingled anger
and amazement that paled her cheek and set her bosom heaving. It was the
first hint of his aims respecting her that Gonzaga had ever dared let
fall, and the condition in which it left her boded ill for his ultimate
success. Her anger he could have borne, had he beheld it, for he would
have laid it to the score of the tone he had taken with her. But her
incredulity that he could indeed have dared to mean that which her
senses told her he had meant, would have shown him how hopeless was his
case and how affronted, how outraged in soul she had been left by this
moment of passionate self-revealing. He would have understood then
that in her eyes he never had been, was never like to be, aught but a
servant--and one, hereafter, that, deeming presumptuous, she would keep
at greater distance.

But he, dreaming little of this as he paced his chamber, smiled at his
thoughts, which flowed with ready optimism. He had been a fool to give
way so soon, perhaps. The season was not yet; the fruit was not ripe
enough for plucking; still, what should it signify that he had given
the tree a slight premonitory shake? A little premature, perhaps, but
it would predispose the fruit to fall. He bethought him of her
never-varying kindness to him, her fond gentleness, and he lacked the
wit to see that this was no more than the natural sweetness that flowed
from her as freely as flows the perfume from the flower--because Nature
has so fashioned it, and not because Messer Gonzaga likes the smell.
Lacking that wit, he went in blissful confid