ir ladies
and win their hearts. Maleotti did not know what his master knew,
therefore, about Dante, but he came to know it on this night. For
Maleotti was among the hearers when Dante, yielding to Messer Guide's
insistence, consented to read the verses of the unknown poet, and his
quick eyes had been as keen as Messer Guido's to understand the meaning
of Dante's change of voice and color when Madonna Beatrice came into the
room.

Now this fellow Maleotti, having, as it seems, nothing better to do with
his petty existence, must have judged, after this discovery, that it
might please his master in some fashion to keep an eye upon Messer Dante
what time he was the guest of Messer Folco of the Portinari on that
evening of high summer. And I believe it to be little less than certain
that he must have observed the meeting and the greeting between Monna
Beatrice and me, although it is no less certain that he could have heard
none of our speech. So when our speech, whatever it was, for it was all
nothing to Maleotti, had come to an end, and I had glided quietly away
from Madonna Beatrice and carried her message to my friend, the Maleotti
rascal still continued his observation of Messer Dante and his actions.

As I learned afterward from one to whom Maleotti told the matter, he saw
at a later hour Messer Dante linger for a while in the garden as one
that is lost in thought. Maleotti swore that he seemed all of a sudden
to stiffen where he stood, even as a man in a catalepsy might do, and
that he stood so rigid and tense for the space, as it seemed to
Maleotti, of several minutes, though why he stood so or what the cause
of his immobility this Maleotti could in nowise conjecture. I, of
course, know very well that this was one of the moments when the God of
Love made itself manifest to him. But after a while, as he affirmed that
told it to me, Messer Dante seemed to shake off the trance or whatever
it was that held him possessed, and then, moving with the strange
steadiness of one that walks in his sleep, made through the most lonely
part of the garden for that wing of the house of Messer Folco where
Madonna Beatrice was lodged. Maleotti, creeping very stealthily at his
heels, saw how he came, after a space, to a little gate in the wall, and
how, as it seemed to Maleotti, the gate lay open before him, and how
Messer Dante straightway passed through the open gateway and so out of
his sight.

Now Maleotti, who was as familiar wit