Ever since at your own invitation I entered your service that evening in your garden here at Casale, where to-day I have again wandered reviving memories that are of the fairest in my life, that service has been my constant study. I have pursued it, by tortuous ways and by many actions appearing to have no bearing upon it, unsuspected by you when not actually mistrusted by you. That your mistrust has wounded me oftentimes and deeply, would have weighed lightly with me had I not perceived that by mistrusting you were deprived of that consolation and hope which you would have found in trusting. The facts afforded ever a justification of your mistrust. This I recognized; and that facts are stubborn things, not easily destroyed by words. Therefore I did not vainly wear myself in any endeavour to destroy them, but toiled on, so that, in the ultimate achievement of your selfless aims for your brother, the Marquis, I might prove to you without the need of words the true impulse of my every action in these past five years. The fame that came to me as a condottiero, the honours I won, and the increase of power they brought me I have never regarded as anything but weapons to be employed in this your service, as means to the achievement of your ends. But for that service accepted in this garden, my life would have been vastly different from all that it has been. No burden heavier than a scholar's would have been mine, and to-day I might well be back with the brethren at Cigliano, an obscure member of their great brotherhood. To serve you, I have employed trickery and double-dealing until men have dubbed me a rogue, and some besides yourself have come to mistrust me, and once I went the length of doing murder. But I take no shame in any of these things, nor, most dear lady, need you take shame in that your service should have entailed them. The murder I did was the execution of a rogue; the conspiracy I scattered was one that would have made a net in which to take you; the deceits I have put upon the Marquis Theodore, chiefly when I made him serve my dear Lord Facino's turn and seduced him into occupying Vercelli, so as subsequently to afford the Duke of Milan a sound reason for moving against him, were deceits employed against a deceiver, whom it would be idle to combat in honest fashion. In his eyes more than any other's--for he is not the only victim of the duplicity I have used to place you ultimately where you should be--I am a double-dealing Judas. And it is said of me, too, that in the field as in the council, I prevail by subterfuge and never by straightforward blows. But my conscience remains tranquil. It is not what a man does or says that counts; but what a man intends. I have embraced as a part of my guiding philosophy that teaching of Plato's which discriminates between the lie on the lips and the lie in the heart. On my lips and in my actions lies have been employed. I confess it frankly. But in my heart no lie has ever been.