onage with
the mantle folded round him was followed constantly by a very different
form, thickset and elderly, in a serge tunic and felt hat. The
conjunction might have been taken for mere chance, since there were many
passengers along the streets at this hour. But when Tito stopped at the
gate of the Rucellai gardens, the figure behind stopped too. The
_sportello_, or smaller door of the gate, was already being held open by
the servant, who, in the distraction of attending to some question, had
not yet closed it since the last arrival, and Tito turned in rapidly,
giving his name to the servant, and passing on between the evergreen
bushes that shone like metal in the torchlight. The follower turned in
too.

"Your name?" said the servant.

"Baldassarre Calvo," was the immediate answer.

"You are not a guest; the guests have all passed."

"I belong to Tito Melema, who has just gone in. I am to wait in the
gardens."

The servant hesitated. "I had orders to admit only guests. Are you a
servant of Messer Tito?"

"No, friend, I am not a servant; I am a scholar."

There are men to whom you need only say, "I am a buffalo," in a certain
tone of quiet confidence, and they will let you pass. The porter gave
way at once, Baldassarre entered, and heard the door closed and chained
behind him, as he too disappeared among the shining bushes.

Those ready and firm answers argued a great change in Baldassarre since
the last meeting face to face with Tito, when the dagger broke in two.

The change had declared itself in a startling way.

At the moment when the shadow of Tito passed in front of the hovel as he
departed homeward, Baldassarre was sitting in that state of after-tremor
known to every one who is liable to great outbursts of passion: a state
in which physical powerlessness is sometimes accompanied by an
exceptional lucidity of thought, as if that disengagement of excited
passion had carried away a fire-mist and left clearness behind it. He
felt unable to rise and walk away just yet; his limbs seemed benumbed;
he was cold, and his hands shook. But in that bodily helplessness he
sat surrounded, not by the habitual dimness and vanishing shadows, but
by the clear images of the past; he was living again in an unbroken
course through that life which seemed a long preparation for the taste
of bitterness.

For some minutes he was too thoroughly absorbed by the images to reflect
on the fact that he saw them, and n