his ways, and he, on his side, seemed to be quite undisturbed
in his studies by the noise and clamor of the drinking-party, and to be
entirely absorbed in the delights of literature.

But if the hunchback student was quite content to let his companions be,
and to find his pleasures in scholarship of a kind, it came about that
one of his companions, in a misguided moment, found himself less content
to leave the hunchback student undisturbed. It was the one of the company
that knew least about him--Pinto the Biscayan, newest recruit in that
huddle of ruffians, and therefore the less inclined than his fellows to
let a sleeping dog lie. He had been drinking deeply, for your Biscayans
are potent topers, and in the course of his cups he discovered that it
irritated him to see that quiet, silent figure perched there in the
window with its wry body as still as if it had been snipped out of
cardboard, with its comical long nose poked over a book, with its
colorless puckered lips moving, as if the reader muttered to himself the
meaning of what he read, and tasted an unclean pleasure in so doing. So
Pinto pulled himself to his feet, steadied himself with the aid of the
table edge, and then, with a noiseless dexterity that showed the
practised assassin, whose talent it is to pad in shadows, he crossed the
room and came up behind the hunchback before the hunchback was, or seemed
to be, aware of his neighborhood.

"What are you reading?" he hiccoughed. "Let us have a peep at it." And
before the hunchback could make an answer Pinto had picked the book
quickly from the hunchback's fingers and held it to his own face to see
what it told about.

Now it would have profited Biscayan Pinto very little if he had been
given time to study the volume, at least so far as its text was
concerned, for the little book was a manuscript copy of the _Luxurious
Sonnets_ of that Pietro Aretino whom men, or rather some men, once called
"The Divine." The book was illustrated as well, not unskilfully, with
sketches that professed to be illuminative of the text in the manner of
Giulio Romano. These might have pleased the Biscayan, for if he had no
Italian, and could, therefore, make nothing of the voluptuousness of the
Scourge of Princes, he could, at least, see as well as another savage the
meaning of a lewd image. But the privilege was denied him. Scarcely had
he got the book in his fingers when it was plucked from them again, and
thereafter, while with