“Say that again, and I will beg it of you.”

“Nay, it is yours, then.  I will send him after you to Rome.”

“Will you?” said Maria Vittoria.  “Why, then, I accept.  There’s my hand;” and she thrust it through the window to him.  “If ever you come to Rome, the Caprara Palace stands where it did at your last visit.  I do not say you will be welcome.  No, I do not forgive you, but you may come.  Having your horse, I could hardly bar the door against you.  So you may come.”

Wogan raised her hand to his lips.

“Aye,” said she, with a touch of bitterness, “kiss my hand.  You have had your way.  Here are two people crossmated, and two others not mated at all.  You have made four people entirely unhappy, and a kiss on the glove sets all right.”

“Nay, not four,” protested Wogan.

“Your manners,” she continued remorselessly, ticking off the names upon her fingers, “will hinder you from telling me to my face the King is happy.  And the Princess?”

“She was born to be a queen,” replied Wogan, stubbornly.  “Happiness, mademoiselle!  It does not come by the striving after it.  That’s the royal road to miss it.  You may build up your house of happiness with all your care through years, and you will find you have only built it up to draw down the blinds and hang out the hatchment above the door, for the tenant to inhabit it is dead.”

Maria Vittoria listened very seriously till he came to the end.  Then she made a pouting grimace.  “That is very fine, moral, and poetical.  Your Princess was born to be a queen.  But what if her throne is set up only in your city of dreams?  Well, it is some consolation to know that you are one of the four.”

“Nay, I will make a shift not to plague myself upon the way the world treats you.”

“Ah, but because it treats you well,” cried she.  “There will be work for you, hurryings to and fro, the opportunities of excelling, nights in the saddle, and perhaps again the quick red life of battlefields.  It is well with you, but what of me, Mr. Wogan?  What of me?” and she leaned back in her carriage and drove away.  Wogan had no answer to that despairing question.  He stood with his head bared till the carriage passed round a corner and disappeared, but the voice rang for a long while in his ears.  And for a long while the dark eyes abrim with tears, and the tortured face, kept him company at nights.  He walked slowly back to his lodging, and mounting a horse rode out of Bologna, and towards the Apennines.

On one of the lower slopes he came upon a villa just beyond a curve of the road, and reined in his horse.  The villa nestled on the hillside below him in a terraced garden of oleander and magnolias, very pretty to the eye.  Cypress hedges enclosed it; the spring had made it a bower of rose blossoms, and depths of shade out of whose green darkness glowed here and there a red statue like a tutelary god.  Wogan dismounted and led his horse down the path to the door.  He inquired for Lady Featherstone, and was shown into a room from the windows of which he looked down on Bologna, that city of colonnades.  Lady Featherstone, however, had heard the tramp of his horse; she came running up from the garden, and without waiting to hear any particulars of her visitor, burst eagerly into the room.