e, at whose side I
rode.

"Friend of mine," I said to him, in a low voice, "I would not willingly
seem either suspicious or timorous, and I hope I am neither. But I think
I have reason for some unquiet. I have noticed something that seems
curious to me in the composition of our company."

To my surprise he turned to me a smiling face, as of one that was too
well contented with his star to be fretted by wayward chances. "I think
I know what you would say," he answered me, cheerfully, "and indeed I
have noticed what you have noticed--that we who ride thus to-night are
all the partisans of one party in Florence. There is not, so far as I
have been able to see, a single man of the other favor among us."

Now this was exactly the fact that I had at last been able to realize,
the portentous fact which had thrilled my spirit with significant
alarms, the fact to which I wished to call his attention, and, behold,
he had anticipated my observation and seemed to draw from it an
agreeable and exhilarating deduction.

"Is it not a compliment," he went on, "to us that are of the Red party,
to be thus signalled out for an errand of such great danger, and, in
consequence, of such great glory, by the head man of the Yellow faction?
I do not suppose," he said, with a smile, "that Messer Simone has
planned the matter solely to pleasure us. Doubtless he has reasoned it
somewhat thusly: if we fail in our enterprise, why then he has very
cleverly got rid of a number of his adversaries."

He paused for a moment, and I caught at the pause to interrupt him
somewhat petulantly. "And if we succeed?" I said, in a questioning
voice, for I was in that happy age of youth and that sanguinity of
temperament which makes it hard to realize that failure can associate
its grayness or its blackness with one's own bright colors of hope. "If
we succeed?"

"If we succeed," Dante echoed me, slowly, "why, if we succeed, then will
not Messer Simone appear indeed to be a very generous and perfect
gentleman, who was willing to give this great opportunity for honor and
conflict to those that were so hotly opposed to him and his people in
the brawls of the city?"

I could not, for my own part, see Messer Simone in this character of the
high-minded and chivalrous knight, and Madonna Vittoria's words of
warning buzzed in my ears with a boding persistence. To be frank, I felt
qualmish, and though I did not exactly say as much, having a sober
regard for the cens