planting, Madonna, of your planting!" She paid no
heed to his compliments; her eyes were fixed. On he hurried. "So far,
indeed, as those worldly concerns go, whereof you hint, I am provided
for. My wife is at Lucca in her father's house--but of such things it is
not fitting we should speak. Rather we should reason together of the
high philosophy of love, which--"

But Selvaggia was gone before he could invite her on such a lofty
flight; the wife at Lucca sent her fleeting down the mossy slopes like a
hare. It was too dark for men to see her face when she tiptoed into
Pitecchio and slipped up to her chamber. Safe at last there, she
shivered and drowsed the night away; but waking or sleeping she did not
cease her dreary moan.

Cino, after a night of consternation, could endure the hermitage no
more; the problem, he was free to confess, beat him. Next day,
therefore, he took horse and rode over the mountains to Bologna, intent
upon finding Dante there; but Dante had gone to Verona with half of his
"Inferno" in his saddlebag. Thither Cino pursued and there found him in
the church of St. Helen, disputing with the doctors upon the Question of
the Land and the Water. What passed between the great poet and the less
I cannot certainly report, nor is it material. I think that the tinge of
philosophy set here and there in Cino's verses, to say nothing of a
couplet or two which give more than a hint of the "Vita Nova," may
safely be ascribed to that time. I know at least that he did not cease
to love his beautiful and wild Selvaggia, so far as he understood that
delicate state of the soul which she, perverse child, had so signally
misapprehended. The truth may well be that he was tolerably happy at
Verona, able to contemplate at his ease the divine image of his lady
without any interference from the disturbing original. He was, it is
said, meditating an ambitious work, the history of the Roman Polity from
Numa to Justinian, an epic in five and twenty books, wherein Selvaggia
would have played a fine part, that of the Genius of Natural Law. The
scheme might have ripened but for one small circumstance; this was the
death of Selvaggia.

That healthy, laughing girl, Genius of Nature or not, paid the penalty
of her incurable childishness by catching a malaria, whereof she died,
as it is said, in a high delirium of some eight hours. So it seems that
she was really unteachable, for first she had spoiled Cino's martyrdom,
and next, by