eeing those two high, simple, and noble spirits
suddenly brought into such strange antagonism--before they, I say, could
formulate any solution of the problem, a man stepped out of the shadow
of the doorway and advanced toward Folco boldly, and the astonished
spectators saw that the man was none other than Messer Simone dei Bardi.
However he may have revelled at the now ended festival, there were no
signs of wine or riot about him now. He stood squarely and steadily
enough, and his red face was no redder than its wont. Only a kind of
ferocious irony showed on it as he loomed there, largely visible in the
yellow air.

"What is all this fuss about?" he asked, with a fierce geniality. "I am
the man you seek after, and why should I not be? Though why you should
seek for me I fail to see. May not a man speak awhile in private to the
lady of his honorable love, and yet no harm done to bring folk about our
ears with torches and talk and staring faces?"

As he spoke those present saw how Madonna Beatrice looked at him, and
they read in her face a proud disdain and a no less proud despair, and
they knew that somehow or other, though of course they could not guess
how, this fair and gracious lady was caught in a trap. They saw how she
longed to speak yet did not speak, and they knew thereby there was some
reason for her keeping silence. Messer Folco looked long at Messer
Simone dei Bardi as he stood there clearly visible in the mingled
lights--large, almost monstrous, truculent, ugly, the embodiment of
savage strength and barbaric appetites. Then Folco looked from Simone's
bulk to his daughter, who stood there as cold and white and quiet as if
she had been a stone image and not a breathing maid.

Folco advanced toward Beatrice and took her by the hand and drew her
apart a little ways, and it so chanced that the place where they came to
a pause was within ear-shot of one of those that Messer Folco had
brought with him, one who stood apart in the darkness and looked and
listened, and this one was Tommaso Severo, the physician. Messer Simone
kept his stand with his arms folded and a smile of triumph on his face,
and I have it on good authority--that, namely, of Messer Tommaso
Severo--that at least one of the spectators wished, as he beheld Simone,
that he had been suddenly blessed by Heaven with the strength of a
giant, that he might have picked the Bardi up by the middle and pitched
him over the parapet into the street below. But