'I'll be frank with you, Ser Gobbo. There is a lady of the palace, a lady of her highness ...' He completed his sentence, by roguishly closing an eye. Gobbo's lean brown old face cracked across in a smile, as becomes an old artist who finds himself face to face with romance. 'You understand, I see,' said Bellarion, smiling in his turn. 'It is important that I should have a word with this lady. There are grave matters ... I'll not weary you with these and my own sad story. Perform a charitable act to your own profit.' But Gobbo's face had grown serious. 'If it were discovered ...' he was beginning. 'It shall not be. That I promise you full confidently. And to compensate you ... five ducats.' 'Five ducats!' It was a great sum, and confirmed Master Gobbo in the impression made by Bellarion's appearance, dress, and manner, that here he dealt with a great lord. 'For five ducats ...' He broke off, and scratched his head. Bellarion perceived that he must not be given time for thought. 'Come, my friend, lend me the clothes for the part and a smock such as is proper, and do you keep these garments of mine in pledge for my safe return and for the five ducats that shall then be yours.' He knew how to be irresistible, and he was fortunate in his present victim. He went off a half-hour or so later in the garb of his suddenly assumed profession and bearing a note from Gobbo to his sons. Late in the afternoon Bellarion lounged in the pavilion in the palace garden to which his pretence had gained him easy admission. He mixed some colours for the two young artists under their direction. But beyond that he did nothing save wait for sunset when the light would fail and the two depart. Himself, though not without the exertion of considerable persuasions based upon a display of his amorous intentions, he remained behind to clear things up. Thus it happened that, as the Lady Dionara was walking by the lake, she heard herself addressed from the bridge that led to the pavilion. 'Madonna! Gracious madonna!' She turned to behold a tall young man with tumbled black hair and a smear of paint across his face in a smock that was daubed with every colour of the rainbow, waving a long-handled brush in a gesture towards the temple. 'Would not her highness,' he was asking, 'graciously condescend to view the progress of the frescoes.' The Lady Dionara looked down her nose at this greatly presumptuous fellow until he added softly: 'And receive news at the same time of the young man she befriended yesterday?' That changed her expression, so swift and ludicrously that Bellarion was moved to silent laughter. To view those frescoes came the Lady Valeria alone, leaving Monna Dionara to loiter on the bridge. Within the temple her highness found the bedaubed young painter dangling his legs from a scaffold and flourishing a brush in one hand, a mahlstick in the other. She looked at him in waiting silence. He did not try her patience.