He moaned with terror and stood rigid; awful it seemed to him that she should track him so stealthily and be so near to him in this silence and he never know of her presence. “Eh, Madonna!” he said. “Eh, Orsini,” she answered in a thin voice, and at the sound of it he stepped away, till his foot was almost in the lake. His unwarrantable horror of her increased, as he found that the glowing twilight had confused him; for, whereas at first he had thought she was the same as when he had left her seated by the pool, royal in dress and bearing, he saw now that she was leaning on a stick, that her figure had fallen together, that her face was yellow as a church candle, and that her head was bound with plasters, from the under edge of which her eyes twinkled, small and lurid. She wore a loose gown of scarlet brocade that hung open on her arms that showed lean and dry; the round bones at her wrist gleamed white under the tight skin, and she wore no rings. “Madonna, you are ill,” muttered Ormfredo Orsini. He wondered how long he had been wandering in the garden. “Very ill,” she said. “But talk to me of Rome. You are the only Roman at the Court, Orsini.” “Madonna, I know nothing of Rome,” he answered, “save our palace there and sundry streets—” She raised one hand from the stick and clutched his arm. “Will you hear me confess?” she asked. “All my beautiful sins that I cannot tell the priest? All we did in those days of youth before this dimness at Ferrara?” “Confess to God,” he answered, trembling violently. Lucrezia drew nearer. “All the secrets Cesare taught me,” she whispered. “Shall I make you heir to them?” “Christ save me,” he said, “from the Duke of Valentinois’ secrets!” “Who taught you to fear my family?” she questioned with a cunning accent. “Will you hear how the Pope feasted with his Hebes and Ganymedes? Will you hear how we lived in the Vatican?” Orsini tried to shake her arm off; anger rose to equal his fear. “Weed without root or flower, fruitless uselessness!” he said hoarsely. “Let me free of your spells!” She loosed his arm and seemed to recede from him without movement; the plasters round her head showed ghastly white, and he saw all the wrinkles round her drooped lips and the bleached ugliness of her bare throat. “Will you not hear of Rome?” she insisted in a wailing whisper. He fled from her, crashing through the bushes. Swiftly and desperately he ran across the lawns and groves, up the winding steps to the terraces before the palace, beating the twilight with his outstretched hands as if it was an obstacle in his way. Stumbling and breathless, he gained the painted corridors that were lit with a hasty blaze of wax light. Women were running to and fro, and he saw a priest carrying the Holy Eucharist cross a distant door. One of these women he stopped. “The Duchess—” he began, panting. She laid her finger on her lip.