th like theirs, that
there were crow's-feet at the corners of his kindly eyes. They could not
phrase the vague feeling that haunted their hearts, or they would have
said that Tonelli, in offering to marry, had voluntarily turned his back
upon his youth; that love, which would only have brought a richer bloom
to their age, had breathed away forever the autumnal blossom of his.

Something of this made itself felt in Tonelli's own consciousness,
whenever he met them, and he soon grew to avoid these comrades of his
youth. It was therefore after a purely accidental encounter with one of
them, and as he was passing into the Campo Sant' Angelo, head down, and
supporting himself with an inexplicable sense of infirmity upon the cane
he was wont so jauntily to flourish, that he heard himself addressed
with, "I say, master!" He looked up, and beheld the fat madman who
patrols that campo, and who has the license of his affliction to utter
insolences to whomsoever he will, leaning against the door of a
tobacconist's shop, with his arms folded, and a lazy, mischievous smile
loitering down on his greasy face. As he caught Tonelli's eye he nodded,
"Eh! I have heard, master"; while the idlers of that neighborhood, who
relished and repeated his incoherent pleasantries like the _mots_ of
some great diner-out, gathered near with expectant grins. Had Tonelli
been altogether himself, as in other days, he would have been far too
wise to answer, "What hast thou heard, poor animal?"

"That you are going to take a mate when most birds think of flying
away," said the madman. "Because it has been summer a long time with
you, master, you think it will never be winter. Look out: the wolf
doesn't eat the season."

The poor fool in these words seemed to utter a public voice of
disapprobation and derision; and as the pitiless bystanders, who had
many a time laughed with Tonelli, now laughed at him, joining in the
applause which the madman himself led off, the miserable good devil
walked away with a shiver, as if the weather had actually turned cold.
It was not till he found himself in Carlotta's presence that the long
summer appeared to return to him. Indeed, in her tenderness and his real
love for her he won back all his youth again; and he found it of a truer
and sweeter quality than he had known even when his years were few,
while the gay old-bachelor life he had long led seemed to him a period
of miserable loneliness and decrepitude. Mirrored in