ote the fact as a change. But when
that sudden clearness had travelled through the distance, and came at
last to rest on the scene just gone by, he felt fully where he was: he
remembered Monna Lisa and Tessa. Ah! _he_ then was the mysterious
husband; he who had another wife in the Via de' Bardi. It was time to
pick up the broken dagger and go--go and leave no trace of himself; for
to hide his feebleness seemed the thing most like power that was left to
him. He leaned to take up the fragments of the dagger; then he turned
towards the book which lay open at his side. It was a fine large
manuscript, an odd volume of Pausanias. The moonlight was upon it, and
he could see the large letters at the head of the page:

MESSENIKA. KB. [In Greek characters.]

In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly; yet an hour or two ago he
had been looking hopelessly at that page, and it had suggested no more
meaning to him than if the letters had been black weather-marks on a
wall; but at this moment they were once more the magic signs that
conjure up a world. That moonbeam falling on the letters had raised
Messenia before him, and its struggle against the Spartan oppression.

He snatched up the book, but the light was too pale for him to read
further by. No matter: he knew that chapter; he read inwardly. He saw
the stoning of the traitor Aristocrates--stoned by a whole people, who
cast him out from their borders to lie unburied, and set up a pillar
with verses upon it telling how Time had brought home justice to the
unjust. The words arose within him, and stirred innumerable vibrations
of memory. He forgot that he was old: he could almost have shouted.
The light was come again, mother of knowledge and joy! In that
exultation his limbs recovered their strength: he started up with his
broken dagger and book, and went out under the broad moonlight.

It was a nipping frosty air, but Baldassarre could feel no chill--he
only felt the glow of conscious power. He walked about and paused on
all the open spots of that high ground, and looked down on the domed and
towered city, sleeping darkly under its sleeping guardians, the
mountains; on the pale gleam of the river; on the valley vanishing
towards the peaks of snow; and felt himself master of them all.

That sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in moments of
exceptional clearness was intensified for him by the long days and
nights in which memory had been little mo