nt; and when at
last Nicolete would consent to stand up straight and let me have a good
look at her,--for, poor child! she was as shy and shrinking as though
she had nothing on,--she made a very pretty young man indeed.

She didn't, I'm afraid, look like a young man of our degenerate day.
She was far too beautiful and distinguished for that. Besides, her dark
curling hair, quite short for a woman, was too long, and her eyes--like
the eyes of all poets--were women's eyes. She looked, indeed, like one
of those wonderful boys of the Italian Renaissance, whom you may still
see at the National Gallery, whose beauty is no denial, but rather the
stamp of their slender, supple strength, young painters and sculptors
who held the palette for Leonardo, or wielded the chisel for
Michelangelo, and anon threw both aside to take up sword for Guelf or
Ghibelline in the narrow streets of Florence.

Her knapsack was already packed, and its contents included a serge
skirt "in case of emergencies." Already, she naughtily reminded me, we
possessed a petticoat between us.

The brief remainder of the evening passed in excited chatter and
cigarettes, and in my instructing Nicolete in certain tricks of
masculine deportment. The chief difficulty I hardly like mentioning;
and if the Obstacle had not been present, I certainly dare not have
spoken of it to Nicolete. I mean that she was so shy about her pretty
legs. She couldn't cross them with any successful nonchalance.

"You must take your legs more for granted, dear Nicolete," I summoned
courage to say. "The nonchalance of the legs is the first lesson to be
learnt in such a masquerade as this. You must regard them as so much
bone and iron, rude skeleton joints and shins, as though they were the
bones of the great elk or other extinct South Kensington
specimen,"--"not," I added in my heart, "as the velvet and ivory which
they are."

We had agreed to start with the sun on the morrow, so as to get clear
of possible Peeping Toms; and when good-nights had been said, and I was
once more swinging towards my inn, it seemed but an hour or two, as
indeed it was, before I heard four o'clock drowsily announced through
my bedroom door, and before I was once more striding along that
river-bank all dew-silvered with last night's moonlight, the sun
rubbing his great eye on the horizon, the whole world yawning through
dainty bed-clothes of mist, and here and there a copse-full of birds
congratulatin