viati bank, where he was occupied as a clerk, nor at his lodgings.

The daughter of a Venetian patrician gone off with a banker's clerk! The
idea maddened the old man--he would trace them, and punish them, and all
who had assisted their flight. Messer Giovanni Battista Buonaventuri,
Pietro's uncle, the manager of the bank; Bianca's maid and her parents;
the two _gondolieri_ and their wives; and ever so many others were cast
into prison.

No news came of the erring couple, and now they were well ahead of
pursuit. Two thousand ducats was the blood-money offered for Pietro,
dead or alive. Assassins bought for gold followed on the road to
Florence, but never caught up their quarry. Messer Bartolommeo's
vengeance knew no bounds, and his new wife, Madonna Lucrezia de'
Grimani-Contarini fanned the flames. She hated Bianca.

The winter sun had long ago set beyond the stone-pines of Monte Oliveto,
and the deep blue Tuscan sky had turned to sober slate, purpled with the
fading glow of northern crimson. It was a night near Christmas, and Ser
Zenobio Buonaventuri sat at his table, in his modest little one-storied
house on the Piazza San Marco, putting the finishing touches to his
_precis_ of the day's notarial work, in the Corte della Mercanzia. His
worthy spouse, Madonna Costanza's weary fingers had just completed the
stitching of the last of twelve pairs of kid gloves, for her employers,
of the Guild of the Fur and Skin Merchants--the Salvetti, who were her
relatives.

They had been talking, as was their wont, about their dashing, handsome
son Pietro, the pride of their hearts, who was away in Venice, a clerk
under his uncle, Giovanni Battista. They were a lonesome couple, and
they deplored their four years' parting from their only boy. To be sure,
he had often, indeed regularly, written to them happy, contented
letters. Moreover, Messer Giovanni Battista had sent them very
satisfactory reports of his application to business, but he named one
subject, which filled the hearts of the doting parents with
apprehension--it was, of course, a story of romance. Pietro had a
sweetheart--that in itself caused little uneasiness; what healthy-minded
young fellow had not! But Pietro had an unusually amorous nature, and
his love escapades had not been few in Florence. In Venice, "the Court
of Venus," he revelled in the fair beauty and the freedom of maidens, so
much more lovely and so much less reserved, than the Florentine girls he
knew.