"It is the most binding your Eminence could take," replied d'Orco, drily; "and now I take my leave, for I believe with you, that if this is to be done at all, it should be done at once. Yet one word more; as you seek no incognito, I will send you a man who knows you already, and whom you know. He is better and more trusty than one of those I thought of. He has been bred in a rare school for such operations. Buondoni of Milan was his tutor, and Ludovic the Moor the regent of the university where he studied." "Ah! who is he?" asked Borgia, with a smile. "He should be a great professor if he have any genius." "Oh, he is a ripe scholar, and a man of much ability," answered Ramiro. "He knows the course of the jugular vein, and the exact position of the heart, as if he were an anatomist. This is no other than our good friend, Friar Peter. He may come to you to-night without his robes on, but you will find Pierre Mardocchi as good a devil as any friar of them all. But we waste time, and again I take my leave." What were the feelings of Ramiro d'Orco as he left the Borgia palace would be difficult to say. He was a man of few scruples, and hardened in that worst of all philosophies, which some even in our own day are so eager to teach, the main axiom of which is, that all men are equally bad, and bold crime is superior to timid vice by the great element of courage. It is hardly possible for a misanthropist to be anything but a villain. And yet, although he would not have shrunk from any ordinary crime, there was something in the calm determination of Borgia to murder his own brother--ay, and even in the arguments he had used to palliate, if not justify the act, which had sent the blood back from his cheek and from his lips, and it seemed to stagnate for a moment. But short consideration was needed to show him that there was but one course left for him to pursue with any chance of safety. The dangerous confidence which Cæsar Borgia had placed in him did not admit of any choice but between death and crime. He must be an accomplice or he must be an enemy; and to be Cæsar Borgia's enemy, for any man unarmoured in mighty power, was to stand upon the brink of the grave. All remorse, all hesitation, therefore, were quickly done away. "I must serve him well," he thought--"must help him to accomplish the deed--must teach him he cannot do without me. Then his own interest will make him my friend in acts, if not in heart."