’Dear lord, so kind and loyal. Tell him that without him we find ourselves astray.’ ’Ay.’ ’Tell him that from this moment his Duchess will aid and abet him in all his reforms.’ ’I will tell him.’ ’Ask him—’ she hesitated, and turned away her sweet head—’doth he seek to retaliate on his mistress’s innocent confidence, that, by absenting himself, he would turn it to her undoing?’ Carlo grunted. ’By your Grace’s leave, an I find him, I will put it my way.’ She acquiesced with a meek, lovely smile, and the words of the Mass: ’_Ite, missa est!_’ And when he was gone, she sighed, and looked in a mirror and murmured to herself in a semi-comedy of grief: ’Alas! too weak to be Messalina! I must be good if he asks me.’ And, being weak, she let her thoughts drift. *CHAPTER XII* In a street of the quarter Giovia the armourer Lupo had his smithy. He had been a notable artisan in a town famous for its steel and niello work; but in his age, as in any, a plethora of fine production must cheapen the value of the individual producer. Therefore when a vengeful caprice blinded him, and his door remained shut and his chimney ceased to smoke, patronage transferred its custom to the next house or street without a qualm; and his achievements in his particular business were forgotten, or confounded with those of fellow-craftsmen, deriving, perhaps, in their art from him. It was a sample of that banal heartlessness of society, which in a moral age breeds collectivists, and desperadoes in an age of lawlessness. And of the two one may pronounce the latter the more logical. In Milan men came quickly to maturity, whether in the art of forging a blade or using it. Life flamed up and out on swift ideals of passion. Parental love, high education, the intricate cults of beauty and chivalry, were all gambling investments in a speculative market. The odds were always in favour of that old broker Death. Yet the knowledge abated nothing of the zeal. It was strange to be so fastidious of the terms of so hazardous a lease. One might be saving, just, virtuous—one’s life-tenancy was not made thereby a whit securer. The ten commandments lay at the mercy of a dagger-point; wherefore men hurried to realise themselves timely, and to cram the stores of years into a rich banquet or two. Master Lupo, a sincere workman and a conscientious, was flicked in one moment off his green leaf into the dust. There, maimed and helpless, the tears for ever welling in his empty sockets, he cogitated tremulously, fiercely, the one sentiment left to him, revenge—revenge not so primarily on the instrument of his ruin, as on Tassino _through_ the system which had made such a creature possible. He lent his darkened abode to be the nest to one of those conspiracies, which are never far to gather in despotic governments, and which opportunity in his case showed him actually at hand.