s
left the younger Cennini--Pietro, the erudite corrector of proof-sheets,
not Domenico the practical. Tito was looking alternately down on the
scene below, and upward at the varied knot of gazers and talkers
immediately around him, some of whom had come in after witnessing the
commencement of the procession in the Piazza della Signoria. Piero di
Cosimo was raising a laugh among them by his grimaces and anathemas at
the noise of the bells, against which no kind of ear-stuffing was a
sufficient barricade, since the more he stuffed his ears the more he
felt the vibration of his skull; and declaring that he would bury
himself in the most solitary spot of the Valdarno on a _festa_, if he
were not condemned, as a painter, to lie in wait for the secrets of
colour that were sometimes to be caught from the floating of banners and
the chance grouping of the multitude.

Tito had just turned his laughing face away from the whimsical painter
to look down at the small drama going on among the checkered border of
spectators, when at the angle of the marble steps in front of the Duomo,
nearly opposite Nello's shop, he saw a man's face upturned towards him,
and fixing on him a gaze that seemed to have more meaning in it than the
ordinary passing observation of a stranger. It was a face with tonsured
head, that rose above the black mantle and white tunic of a Dominican
friar--a very common sight in Florence; but the glance had something
peculiar in it for Tito. There was a faint suggestion in it, certainly
not of an unpleasant kind. Yet what pleasant association had he ever
had with monks? None. The glance and the suggestion hardly took longer
than a flash of lightning.

"Nello!" said Tito, hastily, but immediately added, in a tone of
disappointment, "Ah, he has turned round. It was that tall, thin friar
who is going up the steps. I wanted you to tell me if you knew aught of
him?"

"One of the Frati Predicatori," said Nello, carelessly; "you don't
expect me to know the private history of the crows."

"I seem to remember something about his face," said Tito. "It is an
uncommon face."

"What? you thought it might be our Fra Girolamo? Too tall; and he never
shows himself in that chance way."

"Besides, that loud-barking `hound of the Lord' [Note 1] is not in
Florence just now," said Francesco Cei, the popular poet; "he has taken
Piero de' Medici's hint, to carry his railing prophecies on a journey
for a while."

"The F