“I recoiled in horror and disgust.  Was this his clemency—­this sparing of my life that he might submit it to an eternal shame?  For a moment my mother was forgotten.  I thought only of myself, and I grew resolved to hang.

“‘When you spoke of service,’ said I ’I thought of service of an honourable sort.’

“‘The service that I offer you is honourable,’ he said, with cold amusement.  ’Indeed, remembering that your life was forfeit, you should account yourself most fortunate.  You shall be well housed and well fed, you shall wear silk and lie in fine linen, on condition that you are merry.  If you prove dull our castellan shall have you whipped—­for such a one as you could not be dull save out of sullenness, of which we shall seek to cure you if you show signs of it.’

“‘I will not do it,’ I cried, ‘it were too base.’

“‘My friend,’ he answered me, ’the choice is yours.  You shall have an hour in which to resolve what you will do.  When they open this door for you at sunset, come forth clad as you are, and you shall hang.  If you prefer to live, then don me that robe and cap of motley, and, on condition that you are merry, life is yours.’”

I paused a moment.  Our horses were moving slowly, for the tale engrossed us both, me in the telling, her in the hearing.  Presently—­

“I need not harass you with the reflections that were mine during that hour, Madonna.  Rather let me ask you:  how should a man so placed make choice to be full worthy of the office proffered him?”

There was a moment’s silence while she pondered.

“Why,” she answered me, at last, “a fool I take it would have chosen death:  the wise man life, since it must hold the hope of better days.”

“And since it asked a man of wit to play the fool to such a tune as the Lord Giovanni piped, that wise young man chose life and folly.  But was that choice indeed so wise?  The story ends not there.  That young men whose early life had been one of hardships found himself, indeed, well-housed and fed as the Lord Giovanni had promised him, and so he fell into a slothful spirit, and was content to play the Fool for bed and board.

“There were times when conscience knocked loudly at my heart, and I was tortured with shame to see myself in the garb of Fools, the sport of all, from prince to scullion.  But in the three years that I had dwelt at Pesaro my identity had been forgotten by the few who had ever been aware of it.  Moreover, a court is a place of changes, and in three years there had been such comings and goings at the Court of Giovanni Sforza, that not more than one or two remained of those that had inhabited it when first I entered on my existence there.  Thus had my position grown steadily more bearable.  I was just a jester and no more, and so, in a measure—­though I blush to say it—­I grew content.  I gathered consolation from the fact that there were not any who now remembered the story of my coming to