ddles and banging of drums
announced that the performance had begun.

The entertainment was of the roughest kind. A few clowns, harlequins,
and acrobats, a circus-rider jumping through hoops, the painted
columbine, and the hunchback performing various dull and foolish antics,
represented the entire force of the company. The jokes were not, on the
whole, coarse or offensive; but they were very tame and stale, and there
was a depressing flatness about the whole thing. The audience laughed
and clapped from their innate Tuscan courtesy; but the only part which
they seemed really to enjoy was the performance of the hunchback, in
which Gemma could find nothing either witty or skilful. It was merely
a series of grotesque and hideous contortions, which the spectators
mimicked, holding up children on their shoulders that the little ones
might see the "ugly man."

"Signor Rivarez, do you really think this attractive?" said Gemma,
turning to the Gadfly, who was standing beside her, his arm round one of
the wooden posts of the tent. "It seems to me----"

She broke off and remained looking at him silently. Except when she had
stood with Montanelli at the garden gate in Leghorn, she had never seen
a human face express such fathomless, hopeless misery. She thought of
Dante's hell as she watched him.

Presently the hunchback, receiving a kick from one of the clowns,
turned a somersault and tumbled in a grotesque heap outside the ring. A
dialogue between two clowns began, and the Gadfly seemed to wake out of
a dream.

"Shall we go?" he asked; "or would you like to see more?"

"I would rather go."

They left the tent, and walked across the dark green to the river. For a
few moments neither spoke.

"What did you think of the show?" the Gadfly asked presently.

"I thought it rather a dreary business; and part of it seemed to me
positively unpleasant."

"Which part?"

"Well, all those grimaces and contortions. They are simply ugly; there
is nothing clever about them."

"Do you mean the hunchback's performance?"

Remembering his peculiar sensitiveness on the subject of his own
physical defects, she had avoided mentioning this particular bit of the
entertainment; but now that he had touched upon the subject himself, she
answered: "Yes; I did not like that part at all."

"That was the part the people enjoyed most."

"I dare say; and that is just the worst thing about it."

"Because it was inartistic?"

"N-no; it was all