us carelessness, that he came from Genoa, and had been directed to
Bratti's shop by an acquaintance in that city who had bought a very
valuable ring here. Had the respectable trader any more such rings?

Whereupon Bratti had much to say as to the unlikelihood of such rings
being within reach of many people, with much vaunting of his own rare
connections, due to his known wisdom, and honesty. It might be true
that he was a pedlar--he chose to be a pedlar; though he was rich enough
to kick his heels in his shop all day. But those who thought they had
said all there was to be said about Bratti when they had called him a
pedlar, were a good deal further off the truth than the other side of
Pisa. How was it that he could put that ring in a stranger's way? It
was, because he had a very particular knowledge of a handsome young
signor, who did not look quite so fine a feathered bird when Bratti
first set eyes on him as he did at the present time. And by a question
or two Baldassarre extracted, without any trouble, such a rough and
rambling account of Tito's life as the pedlar could give, since the time
when he had found him sleeping under the Loggia de' Cerchi. It never
occurred to Bratti that the decent man (who was rather deaf, apparently,
asking him to say many things twice over) had any curiosity about Tito;
the curiosity was doubtless about himself, as a truly remarkable pedlar.

And Baldassarre left Bratti's shop, not only with the dagger at his
side, but also with a general knowledge of Tito's conduct and position--
of his early sale of the jewels, his immediate quiet settlement of
himself at Florence, his marriage, and his great prosperity.

"What story had he told about his previous life--about his father?"

It would be difficult for Baldassarre to discover the answer to that
question. Meanwhile, he wanted to learn all he could about Florence.
But he found, to his acute distress, that of the new details he learned
he could only retain a few, and those only by continual repetition; and
he began to be afraid of listening to any new discourse, lest it should
obliterate what he was already striving to remember.

The day he was discerned by Tito in the Piazza del Duomo, he had the
fresh anguish of this consciousness in his mind, and Tito's ready speech
fell upon him like the mockery of a glib, defying demon.

As he went home to his heap of straw, and passed by the booksellers'
shops in the Via del Garbo, he paus