afety, of Florence. The banner of France will float over every
Florentine galley in sign of amity and common privilege, but above that
banner will be written the word `Liberty!'

"That is all the news I have to tell; is it not enough?--since it is for
the glory of every one of you, citizens of Florence, that you have a
fellow-citizen who knows how to speak your will."

As the shouts rose again, Tito looked round with inward amusement at the
various crowd, each of whom was elated with the notion that Piero
Capponi had somehow represented him--that he was the mind of which
Capponi was the mouthpiece. He enjoyed the humour of the incident,
which had suddenly transformed him, an alien, and a friend of the
Medici, into an orator who tickled the ears of the people blatant for
some unknown good which they called liberty. He felt quite glad that he
had been laid hold of and hurried along by the crowd as he was coming
out of the palace in the Via Larga with a commission to the Signoria.
It was very easy, very pleasant, this exercise of speaking to the
general satisfaction: a man who knew how to persuade need never be in
danger from any party; he could convince each that he was feigning with
all the others. The gestures and faces of weavers and dyers were
certainly amusing when looked at from above in this way.

Tito was beginning to get easier in his armour, and at this moment was
quite unconscious of it. He stood with one hand holding his recovered
cap, and with the other at his belt, the light of a complacent smile in
his long lustrous eyes, as he made a parting reverence to his audience,
before springing down from the bales--when suddenly his glance met that
of a man who had not at all the amusing aspect of the exulting weavers,
dyers, and woolcarders. The face of this man was clean-shaven, his hair
close-clipped, and he wore a decent felt hat. A single glance would
hardly have sufficed to assure any one but Tito that this was the face
of the escaped prisoner who had laid hold of him on the steps. But to
Tito it came not simply as the face of the escaped prisoner, but as a
face with which he had been familiar long years before.

It seemed all compressed into a second--the sight of Baldassarre looking
at him, the sensation shooting through him like a fiery arrow, and the
act of leaping from the cart. He would have leaped down in the same
instant, whether he had seen Baldassarre or not, for he was in a hurry
to be g