but--Messer Endymion minded his manners after that
singular good fortune of his; and what says our Luigi Pulci?

"`Da quel giorno in qua ch'amor m'accese
Per lei son fatto e gentile e cortese.'"

"Nello, _amico mio_, thou hast an intolerable trick of making life stale
by forestalling it with thy talk," said Tito, shrugging his shoulders,
with a look of patient resignation, which was his nearest approach to
anger: "not to mention that such ill-founded babbling would be held a
great offence by that same goddess whose humble worshipper you are
always professing yourself."

"I will be mute," said Nello, laying his finger on his lips, with a
responding shrug. "But it is only under our four eyes that I talk any
folly about her."

"Pardon! you were on the verge of it just now in the hearing of others.
If you want to ruin me in the minds of Bardo and his daughter--"

"Enough, enough!" said Nello. "I am an absurd old barber. It all comes
from that abstinence of mine, in not making bad verses in my youth: for
want of letting my folly run out that way when I was eighteen, it runs
out at my tongue's end now I am at the unseemly age of fifty. But Nello
has not got his head muffled for all that; he can see a buffalo in the
snow. _Addio, giovane mio_."

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Note 1. A play on the name of the Dominicans (_Domini Canes_) which was
accepted by themselves, and which is pictorially represented in a fresco
painted for them by Simone Memmi.

Note 2. "Arte di Calimara", "arte" being, in this use of it, equivalent
to corporation.

CHAPTER NINE.

A MAN'S RANSOM.

Tito was soon down among the crowd, and, notwithstanding his indifferent
reply to Nello's question about his chance acquaintance, he was not
without a passing wish, as he made his way round the piazza to the Corso
degli Adimari, that he might encounter the pair of blue eyes which had
looked up towards him from under the square bit of white linen drapery
that formed the ordinary hood of the contadina at festa time. He was
perfectly well aware that that face was Tessa's; but he had not chosen
to say so. What had Nello to do with the matter? Tito had an innate
love of reticence--let us say a talent for it--which acted as other
impulses do, without any conscious motive, and, like all people to whom
concealment is easy, he would now and then conceal something which had
as little the nature o