'I was not to know,' he answered her, 'that in the meantime the duchy would go to pieces.' 'Why should you care? It is not your duchy. Though a man might have made it so by this.' 'To make you a duchess, eh?' Facino smiled. His tone was quiet, but it bore the least strain of bitterness. This was an old argument between them, though Bellarion heard it now for the first time. 'There are obstacles supplied by honour. Shall I enumerate them?' 'I know them by heart, your obstacles of honour.' She thrust out a lip that was very full and red, suggesting the strong life within her. 'They did not suffice to curb Pandolfo or Buonterzo, and they are at least as well-born as you.' 'We will leave my birth out of the discussion, madonna.' 'Your reluctance to be reminded of it is natural enough,' she insisted with malice. He turned away, and moved across to one of the tall mullioned windows, trailing his feet through the pine-needles and slim boughs of evergreens with which the floor was strewn in place of rushes, unprocurable at this season of the year. His thumbs were thrust into the golden girdle that cinctured his trailing houppelande of crimson velvet edged with lynx fur. He stood a moment in silence, his broad square shoulders to the room, looking out upon the wintry landscape. 'The snow is falling more heavily,' he said at last. But even upon that her malice fastened. 'It will be falling still more heavily in the hills about Bergamo where Pandolfo rules ...' He span round to interrupt her, and his voice rasped with sarcasm. 'And not quite so heavily in the plain about Piacenza, where Ottone Buonterzo is tyrant. If you please, madonna, we will change the subject.' 'I do not please.' 'But I do.' His voice beat upwards to the tones that had reduced whole squadrons to instant obedience. The lady laughed, and none too tunefully. She drew her rich cloak of ermine more closely about her shapely figure. 'And of course what you please is ever to be the law. We come when you please, and we depart again as soon as you are tired of country solitude.' He stared at her frowning, a little puzzled. 'Why, Bice,' he said slowly, 'I never before knew you attached to Abbiategrasso. You have ever made a lament of being brought hither, and you deafened me with your complaints three months ago when we left Milan.' 'Which, nevertheless, did not restrain you from forcing me to come.' 'That does not answer me.' He advanced towards her. 'What is this sudden attachment to the place? Why this sudden reluctance to return to the Milan you profess to love, the gaieties of the court in which you strain to shine?'