Yet, though loving truth, he lied; yet, though hating the sight of blood, he procured its shedding; yet, though admiring virtue, he did not hesitate to prostitute it to his ends. There were crimes attributed to him of which he was no doubt innocent; there were lesser, or worse, unrecorded, of which he was no doubt guilty. Feeling himself, by temperament and intellect, the inevitable instrument of a vast emancipation, recognising his call to be as peremptory as it was unconsidered, he had no choice, in obeying it, but to cast scruples to the winds. With him, as with his contemporary the English Richard, a deep fervour of patriotism was at once the goad and the destruction. Judgment on the means both took to vindicate their commissions rests with the gods, who first inspired, then repudiated them. But there is no logic in Olympus. Ludovico was sitting one evening in his private cabinet in the castello, when a lady was announced to him by the soft-voiced page. Every one instinctively subdued his speech in the presence of Messer Ludovico, even the rough venderaccios who occasionally came to make him their reports or receive his instructions. The lady came in, and stood silent as a statue by the heavy portière, which, closed, cut off all eavesdropping as effectively as a mattress. Nevertheless Messer Ludovico waited for full assurance of the page’s withdrawal before he rose, and courteously greeted his visitor. ’Ave, Madonna Beatrice!’ he said. ’You are welcome as the moonlight in my poor apartment.’ It was so far from being that, as to make the compliment an extravagance. Yet the beauty of the woman in her long black robe and mantle, and little black silk cap dropping wings of muslin, sorted gravely enough with the slumberous gold of picture frames under the lamplight, and all the sombre sparkle of gems and glass and silver with which the chamber was strewed in a considered disorder. ’You sent for me, Messer, and I have come,’ she said. Her low, untroubled voice was quite in keeping with the rest. ’Fie, fie!’ he answered smoothly. ’I begged a privilege, I begged an honour—with diffidence, of one so lately stricken. Will you be seated while I stand?’ As her subject, he meant to imply. She accepted the condescension for what it was worth. He bent his heavy eyebrows on her pleasantly. They were full and shaggy for so young a man. Presently she found the silence intolerable. ’You sent for me, Messer,’ she repeated coldly. ’Will you say on account of which of your interests?’ ’See the dangerous intuition of your sex!’ he retorted smilingly—’a weapon wont to cut its wielder’s hand. On account of _your_ interest, purely.’ She glanced up at him with insolent incredulity. ’True,’ he said. ’I desired only to save you the consequences of an imprudence. That troth-ring, Madonna, our Duchess’s: is it not rather a perilous toy to play with?’