me:  whether is more truly father to your son, I that held him at the font, or your husband that begot him?” “My husband,” replied the lady.  “Sooth say you,” returned the friar, “and does not your husband lie with you?” “Why, yes,” said the lady.  “Then,” rejoined the friar, “I that am less truly your son’s father than your husband, ought also to lie with you, as does your husband.”  The lady was no logician, and needed little to sway her:  she therefore believed or feigned to believe that what the friar said was true.  So:—­ “Who might avail to answer your words of wisdom?” quoth she; and presently forgot the godfather in the lover, and complied with his desires.  Nor had they begun their course to end it forthwith:  but under cover of the friar’s sponsorship, which set them more at ease, as it rendered them less open to suspicion, they forgathered again and again.

But on one of these occasions it so befell that Fra Rinaldo, being come to the lady’s house, where he espied none else save a very pretty and dainty little maid that waited on the lady, sent his companion away with her into the pigeon-house, there to teach her the paternoster, while he and the lady, holding her little boy by the hand, went into the bedroom, locked themselves in, got them on to a divan that was there, and began to disport them.  And while thus they sped the time, it chanced that the father returned, and, before any was ware of him, was at the bedroom door, and knocked, and called the lady by her name.  Whereupon:—­“’Tis as much as my life is worth,” quoth Madonna Agnesa; “lo, here is my husband; and the occasion of our intimacy cannot but be now apparent to him.”  “Sooth say you,” returned Fra Rinaldo, who was undressed, that is to say, had thrown off his habit and hood, and was in his tunic; “if I had but my habit and hood on me in any sort, ’twould be another matter; but if you let him in, and he find me thus, ’twill not be possible to put any face on it.”  But with an inspiration as happy as sudden:—­“Now get them on you,” quoth the lady; “and when you have them on, take your godson in your arms, and give good heed to what I shall say to him, that your words may accord with mine; and leave the rest to me.”

The good man was still knocking, when his wife made answer:—­ “Coming, coming.”  And so up she got, and put on a cheerful countenance and hied her to the door, and opened it and said:—­“Husband mine:  well indeed was it for us that in came Fra Rinaldo, our sponsor; ’twas God that sent him to us; for in sooth, but for that, we had to-day lost our boy.”  Which the poor simpleton almost swooned to hear; and:—­“How so?” quoth he.  “O husband mine,” replied the lady, “he was taken but now, all of a sudden, with a fainting fit, so that I thought he was dead:  and what to do or say I knew not, had not Fra Rinaldo, our sponsor, come just in the nick of time, and set him on his shoulder, and said:—­’Gossip, ’tis that he has worms in his body, and getting,