Vittoria stayed at Ischia, and to ease her grief for her loved husband wrote many sonnets dealing with their life together. Her poems were considered very beautiful and her fame grew until she was accounted among the greatest of Italian writers. After a time she traveled and everywhere she was received with the highest honors as a poetess. At last she settled in Rome, and there her house was the centre of learning in the city. All men of talent claimed to be her friends, and the letters of the day were filled with accounts of her genius, her holiness, and her beauty. Chief among her friends was the great painter Michael Angelo, and the friendship of each was a continual inspiration to the genius of the other. So it was that this girl who saved her betrothed husband from his enemies that day at Ischia became in time one of the noblest figures in Italian life, one of the finest flowers of what we call the Renaissance in Europe. IV Catherine de' Medici The Girl of Mediæval Italy: 1519-1589 A stone bench with arms carved to represent crouching lions stood under an ilex tree in a corner of the Medici gardens in Florence. There, on a certain autumn afternoon, sat two girls, talking languidly, for the day was hot. Both were dark, but one looked much like a hundred other girls to be met in the streets of Florence, the other was striking. Her long, oval face was very pale, and seemed the more colorless in contrast with the black hair which she wore low on her forehead and over the tips of her ears. Her lips were thin and straight, and her eyelids made her eyes look long and narrow, almost like two slits from which gleamed a singularly bright or a dull light, depending on whether she were interested or indifferent. Delicate black brows were penciled above those eyes. She was handsome, but one might also judge that she was crafty. Just now she was admiring the glitter of a ruby in a ring upon her hand. "How much it looks like a drop of blood," she was saying. "Hast thou ever seen one of those rings, Bianca, with a little hidden place to carry poison? My uncle Filippo has one. The Duke's goldsmith made it for him." "I hate all such things," said Bianca. "If I had such a ring I'd throw it into the Arno." "Nevertheless they are useful sometimes. My uncle and the Duke are playing at being friends now, but thou knowest that to-morrow they might well be at each other's throats." She smoothed a fold of the green gown on her knee. "I like my uncle, but the Duke----" she shrugged her shoulders. "I trust him no more than I would the rabble of Florence. He is kind to me now. In good faith I know there is some reason for it. 'Tis not love of me or because I am a girl of his house of the Medici." "Softly," warned Bianca. "Here is he now coming through the garden."