, had sought for and found Messer Dante, after a little
seeking hither and thither through the press of eager, generous youths
that were bestirring themselves to strike a good stroke for Florence
that night. I found him standing quietly alone, with his hand resting in
a kindly command upon the neck of the steed that he had chosen, and a
look of great happiness softening the native sternness of his regard. I
stood by him in silence till we rode, for after our first salutation he
chose to be taciturn, and that in no unfriendly seeming, but as one
might that had great thoughts to think and counted very certainly upon
the acquiescence of a friend. And I was ever a man to respect the
humors, grave or merry, of my friends.

So I stood by him and held my peace until the muster-roll of our
fellowship was completed, and it seemed good to Maleotti that the signal
should be given for our departure upon our business. But while I waited
I looked hither and thither through the moon-lit gloom to discern this
face and that of familiar youth, and as I noted them and named them to
myself, I was dimly conscious of a thought that would not take shape in
words, and yet a thought that, all unwittingly, troubled me. I seemed
like a child that tries, and tries in vain, to recall some duty that was
set upon it, and that has wickedly slipped its memory. Man after man of
the figures that moved about me in the darkness was well known to me.
Those faces, those figures, were the faces and figures of intimates
whose pleasures I shared daily, companions with whom I had grown up,
playfellows in the days when we gambolled in the streets, playfellows
now in the pleasant fields of love and revelry. What could there be, I
asked myself, almost unconscious that I did so question--what could
there be in the presence of so many well-known, so many well-liked, so
many well-trusted gentlemen, to make me feel so inexplicably ill at
ease? Where can a man stand better, I seemed to ask myself, than in the
centre of a throng of men that are all his friends? Thus I puzzled and
fumed in the silent minutes ere we started, struggling with my
unaccountable misgivings, not realizing that it was the very fact that
all about me were my friends which was the cause of my most natural
disquiet. It was not until we were all in the saddle and well upon our
way to Arezzo, that with a sudden clearness my muffled thought asserted
itself, and I must needs make it known at once to Dant