Your wits play you false. Peppino, call my ladies."
In the moment that they were left alone he stepped close up to her,
spurred to madness by the jealous pangs he had that day endured. His
face gleamed white in the candlelight, and in his eyes there was a
lurking fierceness that gave her pause.
"Have your way, Madonna," he said, in a concentrated voice; "but to-
morrow, whether we go hence, or whether we stay, he remains not with us."
She drew herself up to the full of her slender, graceful height, her eyes
on a level with Gonzaga's own.
"That," she answered, "is as shall be decreed by me or him."
He breathed sharply, and his voice hardened beyond belief in one usually
so gentle of tone and manner.
"Be warned, Madonna," he muttered, coming so close that with the
slightest swaying she must touch him, "that if this nameless sbirro shall
ever dare to stand 'twixt you and me, by God and His saints, I'll kill
him! Be warned, I say."
And the door re-opening at that moment, he fell back, bowed, and brushing
past the entering ladies, gained the threshold. Here someone tugged at
the prodigious foliated sleeves that spread beside him on the air like
the wings of a bird. He turned, and saw Peppino motioning him to lower
his head.
"A word in your ear, Magnificent. There was a man once went out for wool
that came back shorn."
Angrily cuffing the fool aside, he was gone.
Valentina sank down upon her window-seat, in a turmoil of mingled anger
and amazement that paled her cheek and set her bosom heaving.
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