He hesitated.  “I suppose it is as much ours as ever,” he said.

“And how much is that?” she asked impatiently.

“It is ours as a trust for our people.”

She stared in honest wonder.  These were new signs in her heaven.

“A trust?  A trust?  I am not sure that I know what that means.  Is the money ours or theirs?”

He hesitated.  “In strict honour, it is ours only as long as we spend it for their benefit.”

She turned aside to examine an enamelled patch-box by Van Blarenberghe which the court jeweller had newly received from Paris.  When she raised her eyes she said:  “And if we do not spend it for their benefit—?”

Odo glanced about the room.  He looked at the delicate adornment of the walls, the curtains of Lyons damask, the crystal girandoles, the toys in porcelain of Saxony and Sevres, in bronze and ivory and Chinese lacquer, crowding the tables and cabinets of inlaid wood.  Overhead floated a rosy allegory by Luca Giordano; underfoot lay a carpet of the royal manufactory of France; and through the open windows he heard the plash of the garden fountains and saw the alignment of the long green alleys set with the statues of Roman patriots.

“Then,” said he—­and the words sounded strangely in his own ears—­“then they may take it from us some day—­and all this with it, to the very toy you are playing with.”

She rose, and from her fullest height dropped a brilliant smile on him; then her eyes turned to the portrait of the great fighting Duke set in the monumental stucchi of the chimney-piece.

“If you take after your ancestors you will know how to defend it,” she said.

4.3.

The new Duke sat in his closet.  The walls had been stripped of their pious relics and lined with books, and above the fireplace hung the Venus of Giorgione, liberated at last from her long imprisonment.  The windows stood open, admitting the soft September air.  Twilight had fallen on the gardens, and through it a young moon floated above the cypresses.

On just such an evening three years earlier he had ridden down the slope of the Monte Baldo with Fulvia Vivaldi at his side.  How often, since, he had relived the incidents of that night!  With singular precision they succeeded each other in his thoughts.  He felt the wild sweep of the storm across the lake, the warmth of her nearness, the sense of her complete trust in him; then their arrival at the inn, the dazzle of light as they crossed the threshold, and de Crucis confronting them within.  He heard her voice pleading with him in every accent that pride and tenderness and a noble loyalty could command; he felt her will slowly dominating his, like a supernatural power forcing him into his destined path; he felt—­and with how profound an irony of spirit!—­the passion of self-dedication in which he had taken up his task.