entered the tower, beat her face and breast, and unable longer to keep silence, cried out:—­“Alas, sweet my lady, where are you?” Whereto the lady made answer as loud as she might:—­“O my sister, here above am I, weep not, but fetch me my clothes forthwith.”  Well-nigh restored to heart, to hear her mistress’s voice, the maid, assisted by the husbandman, ascended the ladder, which he had now all but set in order, and gaining the roof, and seeing her lady lie there naked, spent and fordone, and liker to a half-burned stump than to a human being, she planted her nails in her face and fell a weeping over her, as if she were a corpse.  However, the lady bade her for God’s sake be silent, and help her to dress, and having learned from her that none knew where she had been, save those that had brought her her clothes and the husbandman that was there present, was somewhat consoled, and besought her for God’s sake to say nought of the matter to any.  Thus long time they conversed, and then the husbandman took the lady on his shoulders, for walk she could not, and bore her safely out of the tower.  The unfortunate maid, following after with somewhat less caution, slipped, and falling from the ladder to the ground, broke her thigh, and roared for pain like any lion.  So the husbandman set the lady down upon a grassy mead, while he went to see what had befallen the maid, whom, finding her thigh broken, he brought, and laid beside the lady:  who, seeing her woes completed by this last misfortune, and that she of whom, most of all, she had expected succour, was lamed of a thigh, was distressed beyond measure, and wept again so piteously that not only was the husbandman powerless to comfort her, but was himself fain to weep.  However, as the sun was now low, that they might not be there surprised by night, he, with the disconsolate lady’s approval, hied him home, and called to his aid two of his brothers and his wife, who returned with him, bearing a plank, whereon they laid the maid, and so they carried her to the lady’s house.  There, by dint of cold water and words of cheer, they restored some heart to the lady, whom the husbandman then took upon his shoulders, and bore to her chamber.  The husbandman’s wife fed her with sops of bread, and then undressed her, and put her to bed.  They also provided the means to carry her and the maid to Florence; and so ’twas done.  There the lady, who was very fertile in artifices, invented an entirely fictitious story of what had happened as well in regard of her maid as of herself, whereby she persuaded both her brothers and her sisters and every one else, that ’twas all due to the enchantments of evil spirits.  The physicians lost no time, and, albeit the lady’s suffering and mortification were extreme, for she left more than one skin sticking to the sheets, they cured her of a high fever, and certain attendant maladies; as also the maid of her fractured thigh.  The end of all which was that the lady forgot her lover, and