oned ribs. "Go you, Ser Baldassare
Dardicozzo," he cried, rising grandly in his chair--"go you; you have
mistaken your man. The father stands up superb in the curate's cassock,
and points the door to the chafferer of virgins!"

The tavern-room, on Don Urbano's side to a man, beat the tables with
their glasses; Baldassare had to surrender at discretion. The bargain,
finally struck, was written out by an obliging notary on the
scoring-slate. In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity it was
declared to all men living and to be born, that Baldassare Dardicozzo,
merchant of Verona, was obliged to pay to the reverend father in God,
Urbano, curate of Santa Toscana in the Borgo San Giorgio, the sum of
sixty florins Veronese and two barrels of wine of Val Pulicella, under
condition that if within thirty days from those presents he did not lead
in marriage Giovanna, daughter of the said reverend, he should be bound
to pay the sum of one hundred and twenty florins Veronese, and four
barrels of wine of Val Pulicella.

The notary executed a monstrous flourish at the bottom--a foliated cross
rising out of steps. On the last step he wrote his own name, Bartolo de
Thomasinis; and then Baldassare, smiling as he should, but feeling as he
should not, stuck his seal upon the swimming wax, and made a cross with
the stile like the foundations of a spider's web.

The affair was thus concluded; before the thirty days were up Vanna was
taken to church by her father, and taken from it by her new master.
Within a week she appeared at the doorway of Baldassare's little shop,
very pretty, very sedate, quite the housewife--to sit there sewing and
singing to herself from grey dawn to grey dusk.

II

_TERTIUM QUID_

A year passed, two years passed. Vanna was three and twenty, no more
round but no less blooming in face and figure; still a reedy,
golden-haired girl. But Baldassare was fifty-seven, and there was no
sign of issue. The neighbours, who had nudged each other at one season,
whose heads had wagged as their winks flew about, now accepted the
sterile mating as of the order of things. Pretty Vanna, mother as she
had been to her brothers and sisters, was to be a mother no more. There
was talk of May and December. Baldassare was advised to lock up other
treasure beside his florins; some, indeed, of the opposite camp gave
hints none too honest to the forlorn young wife. The Piazza Sant'
Anastasia at the falling-in of the day, for