and my soul for ever, so it seemed.

To have kissed a maid would have been ill enough for one whose aims were
mine. But to kiss a wife, to become a cicisbeo! The thing assumed in my
mind proportions foolishly, extravagantly beyond its evil reality.

"You are cruel, Agostino," she whispered behind me. She had come to lean
again upon the back of the bench. "Am I alone to blame? Can the iron
withstand the lodestone? Can the rain help falling upon the earth? Can
the stream flow other than downhill?" She sighed. "Woe me! It is I who
should be angered that you have made free of my lips. And yet I am here,
wooing you to forgive me for the sin that is your own."

I cried out at that and turned to her again, and I was very white, I
know.

"You tempted me!" was my coward's cry.

"So said Adam once. Yet God thought otherwise, for Adam was as fully
punished as was Eve." She smiled wistfully into my eyes, and my senses
reeled again. And then old Busio, the servant, came suddenly forth
from the house upon some domestic errand to Giuliana, and thus was that
situation mercifully brought to an end.

For the rest of the day I lived upon the memory of that morning,
reciting to myself each word that she had uttered, conjuring up in
memory the vision of her every look. And my absent-mindedness was
visible to Fifanti when I came to my studies with him later. He grew
more peevish with me than was habitual, dubbed me dunce and wooden-head,
and commended the wisdom of those who had determined upon a claustral
life for me, admitting that I knew enough Latin to enable me to
celebrate as well as another without too clear a knowledge of the
meaning of what I pattered. All of which was grossly untrue, for, as
none knew better than himself, the fluency of my Latin was above the
common wont of students. When I told him so, he delivered himself of his
opinion upon the common wont of students with all the sourness of his
crabbed nature.

"I'll write an ode for you upon any subject that you may set me," I
challenged him.

"Then write one upon impudence," said he. "It is a subject you should
understand." And upon that he got up and flung out of the room in a pet
before I could think of an answer.

Left alone, I began an ode which should prove to him his lack of
justice. But I got no further than two lines of it. Then for a spell I
sat biting my quill, my mind and the eyes of my soul full of Giuliana.

Presently I began to write again. It was n