Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/318

306 he said, half laughing, half sobbing, "you are quite ruined enough. Stay as you are. I will see you every night What! By the Mass, are you not my wife?"

"Of course I am, Angioletto. But nobody thinks so—not even any priest."

"Eh!" he cried, "but that is all the better. Only you and I and Madonna the Virgin of the Greeks know it. She never blabs secrets, and you dare not, and I can't. So you see it is well arranged."

She loved him most of all in this gay humour, and provoked him to new flights.

"But, you wild boy, how can you see me when you are ruined?" she asked, all her roses in flower at the fun of the thing. "How can you be in the Schifanoia if you are thrust out of it?"

Angioletto, with a mysterious air, kissed her for answer. "Leave that to me, my dear," he said. "Never have another of the maids to sleep with you, and lock your chamber door. Now I must go, because I am kicked out. Good-bye, my bride; I shall see you long before another dawn."

She let him go at last, and turned to her duties with less sighing than you would have supposed, and no tears at all. Her belief in the wisdom, audacity, and decision of her Angioletto was absolute. She had never known him to fail. Yet if she chanced to think of the towering Count Guarini plying her with flowers and sweatmeats, she shivered to remember her citadel naked of all defences. This made her feel homesick for her lover's arms. Like a sensible