Love Among the Ruins by Warwick Deeping

In an antechamber in the palace of Sforza of Gilderoy stood the Lady Duessa, watching the day die in the west over a black chaos of spires and gables. Before her, under the casement, lay the palace garden, a pool of perfume, banked with tall cypresses, red with the fire of a myriad roses. As night to the sunset, so seemed this antechamber to the garden, panelled with black oak, a dark square of gloom red-windowed to the west. The place had a sullen, iron-mouthed look, as though its walls had developed through the years a sour and world-wise silence.

The Lady Duessa was not a woman who could trail tamely in anterooms. A restless temper chafed her pride that evening, and kept her footing the polished floor like a love-lorn nun treading a cloister. The casements were open to the garden, and the multitudinous sounds of the city flooded in -- the thunder of the tumbrils in the narrow streets, the distant blare of trumpets from the castle, the clangour of the cathedral bells. A solitary figure companioned the Lady Duessa in the anteroom, cloaked and masked as was the dame herself. It was Balthasar the Dominican, who followed her now in secular habit, having forsworn his black mantle and taken refuge in her service. From time to time the two spoke together in whispering undertones; more than once their lips touched.