and omitting all mention of Gamba and Crescenti.  The Duke assumed a listening air, but it was clear that he could not put off his private thoughts long enough to give an open mind to other matters; and Odo felt that he was nowhere so secure as in his cousin’s company.  He remembered, however, that the Duke had plenty of eyes to replace his own, and that a secret which was safe in his actual presence might be in mortal danger on his threshold.

His Highness on this occasion was pleased to inform his kinsman that he had ordered Count Trescorre to place at the young man’s disposal an income enabling him to keep a carriage and pair, four saddle-horses and five servants.  It was scant measure for an heir-presumptive, and Odo wondered if the Belverde had had a hand in the apportionment; but his indifference to such matters (for though personally fastidious he cared little for display) enabled him to show such gratitude that the Duke, fancying he might have been content with less, had nearly withdrawn two of the saddle-horses.  This becoming behaviour greatly advanced the young man in the esteem of his Highness, who accorded him on the spot the petites entrees of the ducal apartments.  It was a privilege Odo had no mind to abuse; for if life moved slowly in the Belverde’s circle it was at a standstill in the Duke’s.  His Highness never went abroad but to serve mass in some church (his almost daily practice) or to visit one of the numerous monasteries within the city.  From Ash Wednesday to Easter Monday it was his custom to transact no public or private business.  During this time he received none of his ministers, and saw his son but for a few moments once a day; while in Holy Week he made a retreat with the Barnabites, the Belverde withdrawing for the same period to the convent of the Perpetual Adoration.

Odo, as his new life took shape, found his chief interest in the society of Crescenti and Gamba.  In the Duchess’s company he might have lost all taste for soberer pleasures, but that his political sympathies wore a girl’s reproachful shape.  Ever at his side, more vividly than in the body, Fulvia Vivaldi became the symbol of his best aims and deepest failure.  Sometimes, indeed, her look drove him forth in the Duchess’s train, but more often, drawing him from the crowd of pleasure-seekers, beckoned the way to solitude and study.  Under Crescenti’s tuition he began the reading of Dante, who just then, after generations of neglect, was once more lifting his voice above the crowd of minor singers.  The mighty verse swept Odo out to open seas of thought, and from his vision of that earlier Italy, hapless, bleeding, but alive and breast to breast with the foe, he drew the presage of his country’s resurrection.