Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his
labors in the garden, or that his watchful eye had caught the
stranger's face, he now took his daughter's arm and retired. Night was
already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the
plants and steal upward past the open window; and Giovanni, closing the
lattice, went to his couch and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful
girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught
with some strange peril in either shape.

But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify
whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred
during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the
less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni's first movement, on
starting from sleep, was to throw open the window and gaze down into
the garden which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was
surprised and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an
affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun which gilded the
dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter
beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of
ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the
barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely
and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a
symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the
sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his
brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not
determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was
due to their own qualities and how much to his wonder-working fancy;
but he was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter.

In the course of the day he paid his respects to Signor Pietro
Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician of
eminent repute to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction.
The professor was an elderly personage, apparently of genial nature,
and habits that might almost be called jovial. He kept the young man to
dinner, and made himself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness
of his conversation, especially when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan
wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the same
city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, took an
opportunity to mention the name of Dr