I stammered my thanks, shed tears and kissed my director’s hands.  The acts of the next half-hour were done to a wild and piercing music.  I could scarcely breathe, let alone think or speak.  I was swept along the streets, I achieved the portal, I achieved the parlour.  Pictures of saints, wholly Sienese, reeled from the walls:  a great white crucifix dipped and dazzled.  Father Carnesecchi, after a time of shrill suspense, came in to fetch me, took me tottering up the stairs.  My heart stood still; but the door was open.  I blundered in, I saw her again—­her lovely childish head, her innocent smile, her melting eyes, her colour of pale rose, her bounty, her fragrance, her exquisite, mysterious charm!  Blushes made her divine; she curtseyed deeply to me; I fell upon my knee; and Count Giraldi rose from his seat and performed a graceful salute.

She told me that she freely forgave me an indiscretion natural to my youth and position, whose consequences, moreover, could not have been foreseen by either of us.  She said that she was about to return to her husband, who would probably come to Florence to meet her—­and she added that she hoped I should resume my studies at the university, and in serious preparation for the future obliterate all traces of the past.  At these words, which I am inclined to fancy had been got by rote, she sighed and looked down.  I promised her entire obedience in every particular, and growing bolder by her timidity, said that, with the doctor’s permission, I should wait upon her at her convenience.  Aurelia pressed me to come; and then told me that, thanks to the benevolence of Donna Giulia conveyed to her by the excellency of Count Giraldi, my visit might be made at the Villa San Giorgio at her ladyship’s next reception.  “I believe, Don Francis, that you know the way thither,” she said.  Very much affected, I kissed her hand again, and Father Carnesecchi, suggesting that she might be fatigued, took me away.  My next visit to her was paid at the Villa San Giorgio, and on that occasion I saw her alone.  Count Giraldi was, in fact, at that very hour, engaged with Virginia in my lodgings.

This time I was neither ridiculous nor thought to be so.  My lady came into the saloon where I was and ran towards me, begging me not to kneel to her.  She resumed for that happy moment at least her old part of guardian angel, sat on the couch by my side, and looking kindly at me from her beautiful eyes, said in the easiest way, “I see very well that you have not been cared for so well in Florence as in Padua.  Now you are to be your good and obedient self again and do everything I tell you.”

I murmured my long-meditated prayer for forgiveness, making a sad botch of its periods.  She put her hand over my mouth.

“Not a word of that hateful affair,” she said firmly.  “You were absurd, of course, and I was to blame for allowing it; but I could not be angry with such a perfect little poet, and that monster should have known with whom he had to deal.  He knows it now, I believe.  He knows that a Gualandi of Siena is not at the beck and call of a pig of Padua.  When he comes here, he will come in his right senses, you will see.”