to do me such a wrong; but by the body of God I will pay thee out.”  Pinuccio, who was not the most discreet of gallants, albeit he was now apprised of his error, instead of doing his best to repair it, retorted:—­“And how wilt thou pay me out?  What canst thou do?” “Hark what high words our guests are at together!” quoth meanwhile the host’s wife to Adriano, deeming that she spoke to her husband.  “Let them be,” replied Adriano with a laugh:—­“God give them a bad year:  they drank too much yestereve.”  The good woman had already half recognized her husband’s angry tones, and now that she heard Adriano’s voice, she at once knew where she was and with whom.  Accordingly, being a discreet woman, she started up, and saying never a word, took her child’s cradle, and, though there was not a ray of light in the room, bore it, divining rather than feeling her way, to the side of the bed in which her daughter slept; and then, as if aroused by the noise made by her husband, she called him, and asked what he and Pinuccio were bandying words about.  “Hearest thou not,” replied the husband, “what he says he has this very night done to Niccolosa?” “Tush! he lies in the throat,” returned the good woman:  “he has not lain with Niccolosa; for what time he might have done so, I laid me beside her myself, and I have been wide awake ever since; and thou art a fool to believe him.  You men take so many cups before going to bed that then you dream, and walk in your sleep, and imagine wonders.  ’Tis a great pity you do not break your necks.  What does Pinuccio there?  Why keeps he not in his own bed?”

Whereupon Adriano, in his turn, seeing how adroitly the good woman cloaked her own and her daughter’s shame:—­“Pinuccio,” quoth he, “I have told thee a hundred times, that thou shouldst not walk about at night; for this thy bad habit of getting up in thy dreams and relating thy dreams for truth will get thee into a scrape some time or another:  come back, and God send thee a bad night.”  Hearing Adriano thus confirm what his wife had said, the host began to think that Pinuccio must be really dreaming; so he took him by the shoulder, and fell a shaking him, and calling him by his name, saying:—­“Pinuccio, wake up, and go back to thy bed.”  Pinuccio, taking his cue from what he had heard, began as a dreamer would be like to do, to talk wanderingly; whereat the host laughed amain.  Then, feigning to be aroused by the shaking, Pinuccio uttered Adriano’s name, saying:—­“Is’t already day, that thou callest me?” “Ay, ’tis so,” quoth Adriano:  “come hither.”  Whereupon Pinuccio, making as if he were mighty drowsy, got him up from beside the host, and back to bed with Adriano.  On the morrow, when they were risen, the host fell a laughing and making merry touching Pinuccio and his dreams.  And so the jest passed from mouth to mouth, while the gallants’ horses were groomed and saddled, and their valises adjusted:  which done, they drank with the host, mounted and rode to Florence, no less pleased with the manner than with the matter of the night’s adventure.  Nor, afterwards, did Pinuccio fail to find other means of meeting Niccolosa, who assured her mother that he had unquestionably dreamed.  For which cause the good woman, calling to mind Adriano’s embrace, accounted herself the only one that had watched.