“Madonna, I give praise and thanks to Heaven for this,” said he.  “I was afflicted by the gravest misgivings for your safety, and I am more than thankful to behold you safe and sound.”

There was a hypocritical flavour of courtliness about his words, and a mincing of his tones that suggested the efforts of a bull-calf to imitate the warbling of a throstle.

Madonna paid him no heed; indeed, she appeared not to have heard him, for her eyes continued to look past him and at me.  At last her lips parted, and although she scarcely seemed to raise her voice above a whisper, the word uttered reached my ears across the stillness of the great room, and the word was “Lazzaro!”

At mention of my name, and at the tone in which it was uttered—­a tone that betrayed same measure of what was in her heart—­Ramiro wheeled sharply in my direction, his brows wrinkling.  A certain craftiness he had, for all that I ever accounted him the dullest-witted clod that ever rose to his degree of honour.  He must have realised how expedient it was that in all he did he should present himself to Madonna in a favourite light.

“Release him,” he bade the executioners that held me, and in an instant I was set free.  The order given, he turned again to Madonna.

“You have been torturing him,” she cried, and her words were hard and fierce, her eyes blazing.  “You shall repent it, Ser Ramiro.  The Lord Cesare Borgia shall hear of it.”

Her anger betrayed her more and more, and however hidden it may have been to her, to me it was exceeding clear that she was encompassing my destruction.  Ramiro laughed easily.

“Madonna, you are at fault.  We have not been torturing him, though I confess that we were on the point of putting him to the question.  But your timely arrival has saved his limbs, for the question we were asking him concerned your whereabouts!”

I would have shouted to her to be wary how she answered him, for some premonition how he was about to trick her entered my mind.  But realising the futility of such a course, I held my peace and waited agonisedly.

“You had tortured him in vain then,” she answered scornfully.  “For Lazzaro Biancomonte would never have betrayed me.  Nor could he have betrayed me if he would, for after your men had searched the hut in which I was hidden, I walked to Cattolica thinking foolishly that I should be safer there.”

Lackaday!  She had told him the very thing he had sought to know.  Yet to make doubly sure he pursued the scent a little farther.

“Indeed it seems to me that had I tortured him I had given him no more than he deserved for having abandoned you in that hut.  Madonna, I tremble to think of the harm that might have come to you through that knave’s desertion.”  And he scowled across at me, much as the Pharisee might have scowled upon the publican.

“He is no knave,” she answered, and I could have groaned to hear her working my undoing, though not by so much as a sign might I inspire her with caution, for that sign must have been seen by others.  “Nor did he abandon me.  He left me only to go in quest of the necessaries for our journey.  If harm has come to me the blame of it must not rest on him.”