But, with the advent of the stranger, the little pseudo-oracle, the child Tiresias, sweet and blind as Cupid, a sounder opportunity offered. To involve Bona in the defilement of this purity, in the violating of this holy trust, adored by the people and bequeathed to her by her lord—that was, in the vernacular, another pair of shoes. He had noted, with secret gratification, her first coquetting with the pretty toils. He had heard, with plenteous dismay, of the boy’s untimely secession. But he possessed, almost alone in his tumultuous time, the faculty of patience; and he was well served by his well-paid spies and agents. Almost before he could order their reports, almost before he could gauge the significance of one especial piece of information they gave him, the boy, won to forgiveness, was back at court again. Thenceforth he saw his way smoothly, if any term so bland could be applied to such a devious course of policy. That was a matter of cross-roads, leading from, or to, himself, the mute signpost of direction. One, for instance, pointed to Bona’s disgrace through Bembo; another to Simonetta’s disgrace through Bona’s disgrace; a third, to Bembo’s downfall; a fourth, and last, to his nephew’s orphaned minority. And the meeting-place, the nucleus, of all these tendencies was—where he himself stood, on a grave. For did they not bury suicides at cross-roads, and was not Galeazzo’s policy suicidal? Of all these birds he might kill three, at least, with one stone; and that stone, he believed, was already in his hand, or nearly. Let it not be supposed that Ludovico was a wicked man. He was destined to bear one of the greatest of the renaissance reputations; but that reputation was to draw no less from munificence than from magnificence, from tolerance than from power. He stood, at this time, on the forehead of an epoch, feeling the promise of his wings, poising and waiting only for their maturity. His sympathies were all with progress, with moral emancipation. He was even now, in Milan (if it can be said without blasphemy), comparable to Christ in Hades. In a filthy age he was fastidious; precise and delicate in his speech; one of those men before whom the insolence of moral offences is instinctively silent. Guicciardini, a grudging Florentine, nevertheless pronounced him when he came to rule, ’milde and mercifull’; Arluno credited him with a sublimity of justice and benevolence. Others, less interested, testified to his wisdom and sagacity, about which there was certainly no disputing. If at any period the wrong that is ready to perpetrate itself in order to procure good is justifiable, it was to be justified in these corrupt years, when conformity with usage spelt putrefaction. He could foresee no health for the State in patching its disease. He was the operator predestined by Providence to remove, stock and block, the cancer.