’_Meschino me!_’ he had said, greatly laughing over that episode; ’yet I cannot but be glad that the old code beat itself out on his back. ’Twas a reptile well served—a venomous, ungrateful beast. A mercy if it has broken his fang.’ That remained to be seen; and in the meantime Carlo, the old auxiliary in debauch, was taken again into full favour. He accepted the condescension with reserve. The oddest new attachment had come to supplant in him some ancient devotions that were the furthest from devout. He found himself in a very queer mood, between irritable and gentle. He had never before felt this inclination to hit hard for virtue, and it bewildered his honest head. But it made him a dangerous watchdog. By and by the Duke carried his protégé into the Duchess’s privy garden. There was a necessary economy of ornamental ground about the castello, though the most was made of what could be spared. In a nest of green alleys, and falling terraces, and rose-wreathed arches, they came upon the two ladies whom Bembo had already seen, themselves as pretty, graceful flowers as any in the borders. The young Catherine sat upon a fountain edge, fanning herself with a great leaf, and talking to a flushed, down-looking page, who, it seemed likely, had brought news from the court of a recent scandal and its sequel. Her shrewd, pretty face took curious stock of the new comers. She was a pale slip of a girl, lithe, bosomless, the green plum of womanhood. Her thin, plain dress was green, fitting her like a sheath its blade of corn, and she wore on her sleek fair head a cap of green velvet banded with a scroll of beaten gold. A child she was, yet already for two years betrothed to a Pope’s nephew. His presents on the occasion had included a camera of green velvet, sewn with pearls as thick as daisies in grass. It seemed natural to associate her with spring verdure, so sweet and fair she was; yet never, surely, worked a more politic little brain under its cap of innocence. Hard by, on one of the walks, a woman and a child of seven played at ball. These were Bona, and her little son Gian-Galeazzo. As the other was spring, so was she summer, ripe in figure and mellowed in the passion of motherhood. Her eyes burned with the caress and entreaty of it—appealed in loveliness to the fathers of her desires. Her beauty, her stateliness, the very milk of her were all sweet lures to increase. She loved babies, not men—saw them most lusty, perhaps, in the glossy eyes of fools, the breeding-grounds of Cupids. She was always a mother before a wife. The Duke led Bernardo to her side. Pale as ivory, she bent and embraced her boy, and dismissed him to the fountain; then rose to face the ordeal. ’Hail, judgments of Solomon!’ she said, with a smile that quivered a little. ’O believe me, sir, thy fame has run before!’ ’Which was the reason thou dismissedst Gian,’ said Galeazzo, ’in fears that Solomon would propose to halve him?’