No Medicean Secretary of State could have exhibited greater reserve and finesse in argument and deportment than did the new Arch-priest of Meleager in this interview with myself. Had it not all been so tragical and alarming, I could almost have been won to admiration of the easy duplicity of Marzona, who parried my questions and pretended to soothe my complaints of ill-treatment, the while wholly indifferent to the patent fact that I was clearly reading his black hostile heart. The moral prototype of this man must have flourished centuries ago at the venal courts of Rome and Ferrara; had the state craft of the petty Italian despots of the Renaissance been transplanted into the fertile soil of Meleagrian hearts, here in the twentieth century of our Herthian Christian era? Disgusted and wearied at last from this verbal fencing with an invulnerable antagonist, I nodded my head in token that the interview was at an end and the incident closed, my sole ray of consolation being that Marzona did not perhaps truly appraise the full extent of the injury he had dealt me by his recent seizure of Hiridia's person. Possibly he may have relied on my being goaded thereby into indiscreet abuse, and if such were his main object, in this design he had at least been foiled. Verily, this reflection was a sorry crumb of compensation for the blighting loss I had sustained; still, it offered some moral support in itself to think that I had successfully curbed my natural fury. At the same time I did not wholly veil my attitude of intense displeasure, for I argued it might possibly excite fresh suspicion in another guise were I to bear my late discomfiture too lightly in outward appearance. With my heart therefore secretly wrung and tortured and with my brain afire from impotent indignation, I sought to swallow my late indignities with as good a grace as I could muster.