This she did after some demur about the honour of it and her own unworthiness, objections which I brushed peremptorily aside.
So we sat there on that May morning, quite close together, for which there was, after all, no need, seeing that the steps were of a noble width.

At our feet spread the garden away down the flight of terraces to end in the castle's grey, buttressed wall.

But from where we sat we could look beyond this, our glance meeting the landscape a mile or so away with the waters of the Taro glittering in the sunshine, and the Apennines, all hazy, for an ultimate background.
I took her hand, which she relinquished to me quite freely and frankly with an innocence as great as my own; and I asked her who she was and how she came to Mondolfo.

It was then that I learnt that her name was Luisina, that she was the daughter of one of the women employed in the castle kitchen, who had brought her to help there a week ago from Borgo Taro, where she had been living with an aunt.
To-day the notion of the Tyrant of Mondolfo sitting--almost coram populo--on the steps of the garden of his castle, clasping the hand of the daughter of one of his scullions, is grotesque and humiliating.

At the time the thought never presented itself to me at all, and had it done so it would have troubled me no whit.