He turned, and saw Peppino motioning him to lower his head.
"A word in your ear, Magnificent.

There was a man once went out for wool that came back shorn." Angrily cuffing the fool aside, he was gone.
Valentina sank down upon her window-seat, in a turmoil of mingled anger and amazement that paled her cheek and set her bosom heaving.

It was the first hint of his aims respecting her that Gonzaga had ever dared let fall, and the condition in which it left her boded ill for his ultimate success.

Her anger he could have borne, had he beheld it, for he would have laid it to the score of the tone he had taken with her.

But her incredulity that he could indeed have dared to mean that which her senses told her he had meant, would have shown him how hopeless was his case and how affronted, how outraged in soul she had been left by this moment of passionate self-revealing.