"When the time comes you must select such of your ladies--say three or four--as appear suitable and have your trust.

You may take a priest as well, a page or two, and a few servants." Thus, in the gloaming, amid the shadows of that old Italian garden, was the plot laid by which Valentina was to escape alliance with his Highness of Babbiano.

But there was more than that in it, although that was all that Valentina saw.

It was, too, a plot by which she might become the wife of Messer Romeo Gonzaga.
He was an exiled member of that famous Mantua family, which has bred some scoundrels and one saint.

With the money which, at parting, a doting mother had bestowed upon him, he was cutting a brave figure at the Urbino court, where he was tolerated by virtue of his kinship with Guidobaldo's Duchess, Monna Elizabetta.