unheeding as the other."

Gonzaga sighed profoundly, in sympathy, but said nothing.

Here was a grief to which he could not minister, a grievance that he
could do nothing to remove. She turned from him with a gesture of
impatience.

"You sigh," she exclaimed, "and you bewail the cruelty of the fate in
store for me. But you can do nothing for me. You are all words,
Gonzaga. You can call yourself more than my friend--my very slave. Yet,
when I need your help, what do you offer me? A sigh!"

"Madonna, you are unjust," he was quick to answer, with some heat. "I
did not dream--I did not dare to dream--that it was my help you sought.
My sympathy, I believed, was all that you invited, and so, lest I should
seem presumptuous, it was all I offered. But if my help you need; if you
seek a means to evade this alliance that you rightly describe as odious,
such help as it lies in a man's power to render shall you have from me."

He spoke almost fiercely and with a certain grim confidence, for all that
as yet no plan had formed itself in his mind.

Indeed, had a course been clear to him, there had been perhaps less
confidence in his tone, for, after all, he was not by nature a man of
action, and his character was the very reverse of valiant. Yet so
excellent an actor was he as to deceive even himself by his acting, and
in this suggestion of some vague fine deeds that he would do, he felt
himself stirred by a sudden martial ardour, and capable of all. He was
stirred, too, by the passion with which Valentina's beauty filled him--a