Bellarion considered her, and the bold, direct, appraising glance of his hazel eyes, which seemed oddly golden in that light, stirred an unaccountable uneasiness in this proud daughter of the Count of Tenda who had married out of ambition a man so much older than herself. Languidly she moved her fan of peacock feathers, languidly surveyed herself in the mirror set in the heart of it. 'If I were to await further persuasions I must become ridiculous,' said Bellarion. 'A courtly speech, sir,' she replied with her slow smile. Slowly she rose. 'You should make something of him, Facino.' Facino set about it without delay. He was never dilatory when once he had taken a resolve. They removed themselves next day--Facino, his lady, his household, and Bellarion--to the ducal hunting-palace at Abbiategrasso, and there the secular education of Bellarion was at once begun, and continued until close upon Christmastide, by when some of the sense of unreality, of dream experiences, began at last to fade from Bellarion's mind. He was taught horsemanship, and all that concerns the management of horses. Followed a training in the use of arms, arduous daily exercises in the tilt-yard supervised by Facino himself, superficially boisterous, impatient, at times even irascible in his zeal, but fundamentally of an infinite patience. He was taught such crude swordsmanship as then obtained, an art which was three parts brute force and one part trickery; he was instructed in ballistics, trained in marksmanship with the crossbow, informed in the technicalities of the mangonel, and even initiated into the mysteries of that still novel weapon the cannon, an instrument whose effects were moral rather than physical, serving to terrify by its noise and stench rather than actually to maim. A Swiss captain in Facino's service named Stoffel taught him the uses of the short but formidable Swiss halbert, and from a Spaniard named de Soto he learnt some tricks with a dagger. At the same time he was taken in hand by the Countess for instruction in more peaceful arts. An hour each evening was devoted to the dance, and there were days when she would ride forth with him in the open meadows about the Ticino to give him lessons in falconry, a pursuit in which she was greatly skilled; too skilled and too cruelly eager, he thought, for womanhood, which should be compassionate. One autumn day when a northerly wind from the distant snows brought a sting which the bright sunshine scarcely sufficed to temper, Bellarion and the Countess Beatrice, following the flight of a falcon that had been sent soaring to bring down a strong-winged heron, came to the edge of an affluent of the Ticino, now brown and swollen from recent rains, on the very spot where Duke Gian Maria had loosed his hounds upon Bellarion.