'If this were so, it is the price you pay for having cheated him by taking him to husband. Did you tell him this before you were wed?' 'As if such things are ever said! You are dull sometimes, Bellarion.' 'Perhaps. But if they are not said, how are they to be known?' 'Why else should I have married a man old enough to be my father? It was no natural union. Could a maid bring love to such a marriage?' 'Ask some one else, madonna.' His manner became frosty. 'I know nothing of maids and less of love. These sciences were not included in my studies.' And then, finding that hints were wasted against Bellarion's armour of simplicity--an armour assumed like any other panoply--she grew outrageously direct. 'I could repair the omission for you, Bellarion,' she said, her voice little more than a tremulous whisper, her eyes upon the ground. Bellarion started as if he had been stung. But he made a good recovery. 'You might; if there were no Facino.' She flashed him an upward glance of anger, and the colour flooded her face. Bellarion, however, went calmly on. 'I owe him a debt of loyalty, I think; and so do you, madonna. I may know little of men, but from what I have seen I cannot think that there are many like Facino. It is his loyalty and honesty prevents him from gratifying your ambition.' It is surprising that she should still have wished to argue with him. But so she did. 'His loyalty to whom?' 'To the Duke his master.' 'That animal! Does he inspire loyalty, Bellarion?' 'To his own ideals, then.' 'To anything in fact but me,' she complained. 'It is natural enough, perhaps. Just as he is too old for me, so am I too young for him. You should judge me mercifully when you remember that, Bellarion.' 'It is not mine to judge you at all, madonna, and Heaven preserve me from such presumption. It is only mine to remember that all I have and all I am, I owe to my Lord Count, and that he is my adoptive father.' 'You'll not, I hope, on that account desire me to be a mother to you,' she sneered. 'Why not? It is an amiable relationship.' She flung away in anger at that. But only to return again on the morrow to invite his sympathy and his consolation, neither of which he was prepared to afford her. Her wooing of him grew so flagrant, so reckless in its assaults upon the defences behind which he entrenched himself, that one day he boldly sallied forth to rout her in open conflict. 'What do you seek of me that my Lord Count cannot give you?' he demanded. 'Your grievance against him is that he will not make you a duchess. Your desire in life is to become a duchess. Can I make you that if he cannot?' But it was he, himself, who was routed by the counterattack. 'How you persist in misunderstanding me! If I desire of him that he make me a duchess, it is because it is the only thing that he can make me. Cheated of love, must I be cheated also of ambition?' 'Which do you rate more highly?'