The admonition was so lightly uttered that it seemed rather a tribute to Odo’s good sense than a warning to his inexperience; and indeed it was difficult for him, in spite of an instinctive aversion to the man, to quarrel with anything in his address or language.  Trescorre in fact possessed the art of putting younger men at their ease, while appearing as an equal among his elders:  a gift doubtless developed by the circumstances of court life, and the need of at once commanding respect and disarming diffidence.

He took leave upon his last words, declaring, in reply to the Countess’s protests, that he had promised to accompany the court that afternoon to Stupinigi.  “But I hope,” he added, turning to Odo, “to continue our talk at greater length, if you will favour me with a visit tomorrow at my lodgings.”

No sooner was the door closed on her illustrious visitor than Donna Laura flung herself on Odo’s bosom.

“I always knew it,” she cried, “my dearest; but, oh, that I should live to see the day!” and she wept and clung to him with a thousand endearments, from the nature of which he gathered that she already beheld him on the throne of Pianura.  To his laughing reminder of the distance that still separated him from that dizzy eminence, she made answer that there was far more than he knew, that the Duke had fallen into all manner of excesses which had already gravely impaired his health, and that for her part she only hoped her son, when raised to a station so far above her own, would not forget the tenderness with which she had ever cherished him, or the fact that Count Valdu’s financial situation was one quite unworthy the stepfather of a reigning prince.

Escaping at length from this parody of his own sensations, Odo found himself in a tumult of mind that solitude served only to increase.  Events had so pressed upon him within the last few days that at times he was reduced to a passive sense of spectatorship, an inability to regard himself as the centre of so many converging purposes.  It was clear that Trescorre’s mission was mainly a pretext for seeing the Duke’s young kinsman; and that some special motive must have impelled the Duke to show such sudden concern for his cousin’s welfare.  Trescorre need hardly have cautioned Odo against fixing his hopes on the succession.  The Duke himself was a man not above five-and-thirty, and more than one chance stood between Odo and the duchy; nor was it this contingency that set his pulses beating, but rather the promise of an immediate change in his condition.  The Duke wished him to travel, to visit the different courts of Italy:  what was the prospect of ruling over a stagnant principality to this near vision of the world and the glories thereof, suddenly discovered from the golden height of opportunity?  Save for a few weeks of autumn villeggiatura at some neighbouring chase or vineyard, Odo had not left Turin for nine years.  He had come there a child and had grown