I left England early in September, made a good passage to Genoa, and from thence proceeded by easy stages to Padua.  Arriving there by the coach on the night of October 13, I was met by my host and tutor, Dr. Porfirio Lanfranchi, and by him taken to his lodgings on the Pra della Valle and introduced to the charitable ministrations of his young and beautiful wife—­the fair, the too-fair Donna Aurelia, with whom, I shall not disguise from the reader, I fell romantically and ardently in love.

CHAPTER II

AURELIA AND THE DOCTOR

It was, I know very well, the aim and desire of this beautiful lady to approve herself mother to the exile thus cast upon her hands, and it was so as much by reason of her innate charity as of her pride in her husband’s credit.  To blame an ambition so laudable would be impossible, nor is blame intended to lie in recording the fact that she was a year my junior, though two years a wife.  Such was the case, however, and it did not fit her for the position she wished to occupy.  Nor indeed did her beauties of person and mind, unless a childish air and sprightly manner, cloudy-dark hair, a lovely mouth and bosom of snow, a caressing voice, and candour most surprising because most innocent, can be said to adapt a young lady to be mother to a young man.  Be these things as they may—­inflaming arrows full of danger, shafts of charity, pious artillery, as you will—­they were turned full play upon me.  From the first moment of my seeing her she set herself to put me at ease, to make me an intimate of her house, to make herself, I may say in no wrong sense, an inmate of my heart—­and God knoweth, God knoweth how she succeeded.

Aurelia!  Impossibly fair, inexpressibly tender and wise, with that untaught wisdom of the child; daughter of pure religion, as I saw thee at first and can see thee still, can that my first vision of thee ever be effaced?  Nay, but it is scored too deeply in my heart, is too surely my glory and my shame.  Still I can see that sweet stoop of thy humility, still thy hands crossed upon thy lovely bosom, still fall under the spell of thy shyly welcoming eyes, and be refreshed, while I am stung, by the gracious greeting of thy lips.  “Sia il ben venuto, Signer Francesco,” saidst thou?  Alas, what did I prove to thee, unhappy one, but il mal venuto, the herald of an evil hour?  What did I offer thee in exchange for thy bounty but shame and salt tears?  What could be my portion but fruitless reproach and footsore pilgrimage from woe to woe?  But I forget myself.  I am not yet to disinter these unhappy days.