Franceseo sighed deeply.

"Who knows?" he made answer wistfully. "In the few moments that we
talked together, in the little time that I beheld her, it may be that she
dealt me a wound far deeper than the one to which she so mercifully
sought to minister."

Now for all that in what the Lord of Aquila said touching the projected
union there was a deal of justice, yet when he asserted that the chief
actors were to have no opportunity of selecting for themselves, he said
too much. That opportunity they were to have. It occurred three days
later at Urbino, when the Duke and Valentina were brought together at the
banquet of welcome given by Guidobaldo to his intended nephew-in-law.
The sight of her resplendent beauty came as a joyful shock to Gian Maria,
and filled him with as much impatience to possess her as did his own
gross ugliness render him offensive in her eyes. Averse had she been to
this wedding from the moment that it had been broached to her. The sight
of Gian Maria completed her loathing of the part assigned her, and in her
heart she registered a vow that sooner than become the Duchess of
Babbiano, she would return to her Convent of Santa Sofia and take the
veil.

Gian Maria sat beside her at the banquet, and in the intervals of eating
--which absorbed him mightily--he whispered compliments at which she
shuddered and turned pale. The more strenuously did he strive to please,
in his gross and clumsy fashion, the more did he succeed in repelling and
disgusting her, until, in the end, with all his fatuousness, he came to
deem her oddly cold. Of this, anon, he made complaint to that
magnificent prince, her uncle. But Guidobaldo scoffed at his qualms.