hen she
was Gian Maria's wife, she might perhaps repent her of her treatment of
Romeo Gonzaga.

He laughed softly to himself. Then suddenly he turned cold, and he felt
his skin roughening. A stealthy step sounded behind him.

He crumpled the Duke's letter in his hand, and in the alarm of the
moment, he dropped it over the wall. Seeking vainly to compose the
features that a chilling fear had now disturbed, he turned to see who
came.

Behind him stood Peppe, his solemn eyes bent with uncanny intentness
upon Gonzaga's face.

"You were seeking me?" quoth Romeo, and the quaver in his voice sorted
ill with his arrogance.

The fool made him a grotesque bow.

"Monna Valentina desires that you attend her in the garden,
Illustrious."

CHAPTER XIX. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

Peppe's quick eyes had seen Gonzaga crumple and drop the paper, no less
than he had observed the courtier's startled face, and his suspicions
had been aroused. He was by nature prying, and experience had taught
him that the things men seek to conceal are usually the very things
it imports most to have knowledge of. So when Gonzaga had gone, in
obedience to Valentina's summons, the jester peered carefully over the
battlements.

At first he saw nothing, and he was concluding with disappointment that
the thing Gonzaga had cast from him was lost in the torrential waters
of the moat. But presently, lodged on a jutting stone, above the foaming
stream into which it would seem that a miracle had prevented it
from falling, he espied a ball of crumpled paper. He observed
with satisfaction that it lay some ten feet immediately below the
postern-gate by the drawbridge.

Secretly, for it was not Peppy's way to take men into his confidence
where it might be avoided, he got himself a coil of rope. Having
descended and quietly opened the postern, he made one end fast and
lowered the other to the water with extreme care, lest he should
dislodge, and so lose, that paper.

Assuring himself again that he was unobserved, he went down, hand over
hand, like a monkey, his feet against the rough-hewn granite of the
wall. Then, with a little swinging of the rope, he brought himself
nearer that crumpled ball, his legs now dangling in the angry water, and
by a mighty stretch that all but precipitated him into the torrent, he
seized the paper and transferred it to his teeth. Then hand over hand
again, and with a frantic haste, for he feared observation not only from
th