ntemptuous word at
the matter of my reading, and telling me at times that I might find more
profitable amusement.

But I persisted in it, guided ever by Fifanti's lady. And whatever
we read by way of divergence, ever and anon we would come back to the
stilted, lucid, vivid pages of Boccaccio.

One day I chanced upon the tragical story of "Isabetta and the Pot of
Basil," and whilst I read I was conscious that she had moved from where
she had been sitting and had come to stand behind my chair. And when I
reached the point at which the heart-broken Isabetta takes the head of
her murdered lover to her room, a tear fell suddenly upon my hand.

I stopped, and looked up at Giuliana. She smiled at me through unshed
tears that magnified her matchless eyes.

"I will read no more," I said. "It is too sad."

"Ah, no!" she begged. "Read on, Agostino! I love its sadness."

So I read on to the story's cruel end, and when it was done I sat quite
still, myself a little moved by the tragedy of it, whilst Giuliana
continued to lean against my chair. I was moved, too, in another way;
curiously and unaccountably; and I could scarcely have defined what it
was that moved me.

I sought to break the spell of it, and turned the pages. "Let me read
something else," said I. "Something more gay, to dispel the sadness of
this."

But her hand fell suddenly upon mine, enclasping and holding it. "Ah,
no!" she begged me gently. "Give me the book. Let us read no more
to-day."

I was trembling under her touch--trembling, my every nerve a-quiver and
my breath shortened--and suddenly there flashed through my mind a line
of Dante's in the story of Paolo and Francesca:

"Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avanti."

Giuliana's words: "Let us read no more to-day"--had seemed an echo of
that line, and the echo made me of a sudden conscious of an unsuspected
parallel. All at once our position seemed to me strangely similar to
that of the ill-starred lovers of Rimini.

But the next moment I was sane again. She had withdrawn her hand, and
had taken the volume to restore it to its shelf.

Ah, no! At Rimini there had been two fools. Here there was but one. Let
me make an end of him by persuading him of his folly.

Yet Giuliana did nothing to assist me in that task. She returned from
the book-shelf, and in passing lightly swept her fingers over my hair.

"Come, Agostino; let us walk in the garden," said she.

We went, my mood now overpast. I was a