“Child, child,” was her only rebuke; and she added, with a tap on his cheek:  “It is lucky I shall have a sword to protect me.”

Long before the hour Odo was buttoned into his embroidered coat and waistcoat.  He would have on the sword at once, and when they sat down to dinner, though his mother pressed him to eat with more concern than she had before shown, it went hard with him to put his weapon aside, and he cast longing eyes at the corner where it lay.  At length a chamberlain summoned them and they set out down the corridors, attended by two servants.  Odo held his head high, with one hand leading Donna Laura (for he would not appear to be led by her) while the other fingered his sword.  The deformed beggars who always lurked about the great staircase fawned on them as they passed, and on a landing they crossed the humpbacked boy, who grinned mockingly at Odo; but the latter, with his chin up, would not so much as glance at him.

A master of ceremonies in short black cloak and gold chain received them in the antechamber of the Duchess’s apartments, where the court played lansquenet after dinner; the doors of her Highness’s closet were thrown open, and Odo, now glad enough to cling to his mother’s hand, found himself in a tall room, with gods and goddesses in the clouds overhead and personages as supra-terrestrial seated in gilt armchairs about a smoking brazier.  Before one of these, to whom Donna Laura swept successive curtsies in advancing, the frightened cavaliere found himself dragged with his sword between his legs.  He ducked his head like the old drake diving for worms in the puddle at the farm, and when at last he dared look up, it was to see an odd sallow face, half-smothered in an immense wig, bowing back at him with infinite ceremony—­and Odo’s heart sank to think that this was his sovereign.

The Duke was in fact a sickly narrow-faced young man with thick obstinate lips and a slight lameness that made his walk ungainly; but though no way resembling the ermine-cloaked king of the chapel at Pontesordo, he yet knew how to put on a certain majesty with his state wig and his orders.  As for the newly married Duchess, who sat at the other end of the cabinet caressing a toy spaniel, she was scant fourteen and looked a mere child in her great hoop and jewelled stomacher.  Her wonderful fair hair, drawn over a cushion and lightly powdered, was twisted with pearls and roses, and her cheeks excessively rouged, in the French fashion; so that as she arose on the approach of the visitors she looked to Odo for all the world like the wooden Virgin hung with votive offerings in the parish church at Pontesordo.  Though they were but three months married the Duke, it was rumoured, was never with her, preferring the company of the young Marquess of Cerveno, his cousin and heir-presumptive, a pale boy scented with musk and painted like a comedian, whom his Highness would never suffer away from him and who now leaned with an impertinent air against the back of the ducal armchair.