is world. And in point of fact she
falsified all these prophecies, for she continued to live as if by her
votive offering of her hair to the Madonna she had vowed herself to
perpetual maidenhood, and never meant that any man should uncoil the
plaits which she again wound round her head, or twine their soft gold
about his fingers. Many thought that she would go into a convent,
because she preferred working church vestments and altar cloths, and
kept aloof from all public amusements. But she even contradicted this
opinion, and seemed to grow more cheerful as time went on, though still
more ready to listen than to speak; and after the early death of her
parents she removed to a small house in a turret on the city walls,
which had a wide view over the peaceful meadows that are watered by the
streams Piavesella and Rottiniga. There with an old deaf woman, her
nurse, she lived above comment or censure, during a space of ten years,
and no one entered her home except a neighbour now and then, or one of
the noble ladies of the city who came to order some piece of work.
Often, too, one of the spiritual fathers of the town might be seen to
raise the knocker of her door. On these occasions she would call her
nurse into the chamber while she received her visitors, and thus she
contrived to keep malice at bay. Although it was only on Saints' Days
that she allowed her needle to rest, and although she went but little
out of doors, she kept her beauty so unimpaired, that if she ever took
a Sunday walk in the cool of the evening on the walls, or in the
neighbouring woods, accompanied by her old servant, everyone who saw
her large black eyes look out calmly from between their fair lashes
stood as it were transfixed, to gaze after her; and even strangers and
distinguished noblemen who did not know her nature, and would not
credit the reports concerning her, made her many overtures, hoping to
lead her to renounce her single state. But she gave the same answer to
each and all of them, namely, that the life she led was dear and
familiar to her, and that she had no intention of changing it for any
other.

"Thus she had already attained her thirty-second year when the feud
between the two neighbouring towns broke out, and as she was a loyal
daughter of Treviso, she so bitterly felt all the misery and
humiliation that had befallen it, that its deliverance by the valiant
arm of a young fellow-citizen on whom her eyes had never rested,
impressed