’Take good Messer Cola, and—’ he paused a little, gazing winningly into his captive’s surprised, splenetic face—’and have him soundly flogged before the gate-house—to the bone, Andrea, tell Messer Jacopo.’ Before the luring treachery of this stroke the prisoner stood for one moment shocked, aghast. The next, as the guard seized him, he broke into a storm of vituperations and blasphemies, calling upon all the gods of Rome to protect him from a monster. Andrea crushed his mailed hand down on his writhing lips; he was dragged away struggling and screaming. As he disappeared Galeazzo descended mincingly to the hall, bent on pursuing the show. A cloud of courtiers, male and female flocked, like rooks following a plough, in his wake. As he left the citadel and was crossing the outer ward, two ladies—one a young woman in her late twenties; the other a slim, pale girl of thirteen—broke from a group of attendants, and came, wreathed in one embrace, to accost him. The elder, looking in his face with a certain questioning anxiety, spoke him with a propitiatory smile and sigh:— ’Galeazino, O thou little sweetest burden on my heart!’ The endearment was really an inquiry, a warning; for there was a foreboding madness in his eyes. He made as if he would have struck her from his path. Her child companion caught his wrist with a merry cry:— ’My little father, whither sportest thou without thy women?’ He changed the direction of his hand and flipped the younger’s cheek. ’Come, then, chuck,’ said he. ’There is a frolic toward that will speed an idle hour.’ She caught up her skirts and followed him, as did the other, but less closely.