But in Holy Week, at last, we received an abrupt stir which set a whirlpool of excitement in the Dead Sea of our lives.

It was the sudden reappearance of the Lord Giovanni.
He came alone, dust-stained and haggard, on a horse that dropped dead from exhaustion the moment Pesaro was reached, and in his pallid cheek and hollow eye we read the tale of some great fear and some disaster.
That night we heard the story of how he had performed the feat of riding all the way from Rome in four-and-twenty hours, fleeing for his life from the peril of assassination, of which Madonna Lucrezia had warned him.
He went off to his Castle of Gradara, where he shut himself up with the trouble we could but guess at, and so in Pesaro, that brief excitement spent, we stagnated once again.
I seemed an anomaly in so gloomy a place, and more than once did I think of departing and seeking out my poor old mother in her mountain home, contenting myself hereafter with labouring like any honest villano born to the soil.

But there ever seemed to be a voice that bade me stay and wait, and the voice bore a suggestion of Madonna Paola.

But why dissemble here?
Why cast out hints of voices heard, supernatural in their flavour?
The voice, I doubt not, was just my own inclination, which bade me hope that once again it might be mine to serve that lady.
An eventful year in the history of the families of Sforza and Borgia was that year of grace 1497.
Spring came, and ere it had quite grown to summer we had news of the assassination of the Duke of Gandia, and the tale that he was done to death by his elder brother, Cesare Borgia; a tale which seemed to lack for reasonable substantiation, and which, despite the many voices that make bold to noise it broadcast, may or may not be true.
In that same month of June messages passed between Rome and Pesaro, and gradually the burden of the messages leaked out in rumours that Pope Alexander and his family were pressing the Lord Giovanni to consent to a divorce.

At last he left Pesaro again; this time to journey to Milan and seek counsel with his powerful cousin, Lodovico, whom they called "The Moor." When he returned he was more sulky and downcast than ever, and at Gradara he lived in an isolation that had been worthy of a hermit.
And thus that miserable year wore itself out, and, at last, in December, we heard that the divorce was announced, and that Lucrezia Borgia was the Tyrant of Pesaro's wife no more.