He looked around to find the door full of anxious faces, and Tisio behind him.
"Finely I am served!" he cried in a transport. "Do you let the Lady Graziosa go unattended? She hath been murdered, and those who should have been with her shall die for it!"
Weeping ladies and frightened pages crept in and stood aghast, silent at what they saw—more silent at his face.
Visconti stood before Graziosa's body and looked at them with mad eyes; he held a white rose in his fingers. The flickering lamp was just over his head; its light fell on his face and on hers—her sweet face that told its own tale.
For some moments Visconti was silent, gazing at them wildly, and it seemed to more than one of those who crowded there appalled that there came a new expression to his face, a new look into his widely opened eyes—not madness and not rage—but fear.
"In a week I would have made her Duchess of Milan," he said at last, with a sudden break in his voice; and he dropped his white rose at her dead feet, with a shudder, and turned away, through the crowd that fell away from him, down the stairs in silence.
It was two hours later, in the hushed, awe-struck, half-expectant palace, when Visconti opened the door of his inner room and stepped into the antechamber, where one page kept watch.
To him the Duke beckoned, handing him a glass with milk-white lines circling it—a slender, flower-like glass with a long stem.
"Fill up with wine," he said.