'Shall we say ... the desire to serve her?' and Bellarion's smile became at once vague and eloquent. This, taken in conjunction with his reticence, might seem to imply a romantic attachment. Barbaresco, however, translated it otherwise. 'You have ambitions! So. That is as it should be. Interest is ever the best spur to endeavour.' And he, too, now smiled; a smile so oily and cynical that Bellarion set him down at once for a man without ideals, and mistrusted him from that moment. But he was strategist enough to conceal it, even to reflect something of that same cynicism in his own expression, so that Barbaresco, believing him a kindred spirit, should expand the more freely. And meanwhile he drew a bow at a venture. 'That which her highness looks to me to obtain is some explanation of your ... inaction.' He chose the most non-committal word; but it roused the Lord Barbaresco almost to anger. 'Inaction!' He choked, and his plethoric countenance deepened to purple. To prove the injustice of the charge, he urged his past activities of which he thus rendered an account. Luring him thence, by skilful question, assertion, and contradiction, along the apparent path of argument upon matters of which he must assume the young man already fully informed, gradually Bellarion drew from him a full disclosure of what was afoot. He learnt also a good deal of history of which hitherto he had been in ignorance, and he increased considerably his not very elevating acquaintance with the ways of men. It was an evil enough thing which the Princess Valeria had set herself to combat with the assistance of some dispossessed Guelphic gentlemen of Montferrat, the chief of whom was this Lord Barbaresco; and it magnified her in the eyes of Bellarion that she should evince the high courage necessary for the combat. The extensive and powerful State of Montferrat was ruled at this time by the Marquis Theodore as regent during the minority of his nephew Gian Giacomo, son of that great Ottone who had been slain in the Neapolitan wars against the House of Brunswick. These rulers of Montferrat, from Guglielmo, the great crusader, onwards, had ever been a warlike race, and Montferrat itself a school of arms. Nor had their proud belligerent nature been diluted by the blood of the Paleologi when on the death without male issue of Giovanni the Just a hundred years before, these dominions had passed to Theodore I, the younger son of Giovanni's sister Violante, who was married to the Emperor of the East, Andronicus Comnenus Paleologus.