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And at that he touched her chin, gently and masterfully, for Graciosa would have averted her face, and it seemed to Eglamore that he could never have his fill of gazing on the radiant, shamed tenderness of Graciosa’s face. “Oh, my girl!” he whispered. “Oh, my wonderful, worshiped, merry girl, whom God has fashioned with such loving care! you who had only scorn to give me when I was a kingdom’s master! and would you go with me now that I am friendless and homeless?”

“But I shall always have a friend,” she answered–“a friend who showed me what Balthazar’s daughter was and what love is. And I am vain enough to believe I shall not ever be very far from home so long as I am near to my friend’s heart.”

A mortal man could not but take her in his arms.

“Farewell, Duke Alessandro!” then said Eglamore; “farewell, poor clay so plastic the least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping you so bestial; our age, too, had a part–our bright and cruel day, wherein you were set too high. Yet for me it would perhaps have proved as easy to have made a learned recluse of you, Alessandro, or a bloodless saint, if to do that had been as patently profitable. For you and all your kind are so much putty in the hands of circumspect fellows such as I. But I stood by and let our poisoned age conform that putty into the shape of a crazed beast, because it took that form as readily as any other, and in taking it, best served my selfish ends. Now I must pay for that sorry shaping, just as, I think, you too must pay some day. And so, I cry farewell with loathing, but with compassion also!”

Then these two turned toward the hills, leaving Duke Alessandro where he lay in the road, a very lamentable figure in much bloodied finery. They turned toward the hills, and entered a forest whose ordering was time’s contemporary, and where there was no grandeur save that of the trees.

But upon the summit of the nearest hill they paused and looked over a restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro’s attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the most solicitous among them.

Beyond was the broad river, seen as a ribbon of silver now, and on its remoter bank the leaded roofs of a strong fortress glistened like a child’s new toy. Tilled fields showed here and there, no larger in appearance than so many outspread handkerchiefs. Far down in the east a small black smudge upon the pearl-colored and vaporous horizon was all they could discern of a walled city filled with factories for the working of hemp and furs and alum and silk and bitumen.

“It is a very rich and lovely land,” said Eglamore–“this kingdom which a half-hour since lay in the hollow of my hand.” He viewed it for a while, and not without pensiveness. Then he took Graciosa’s hand and looked into her face, and he laughed joyously.