“I wish you good morning, Fra Palamone,” I said.  His grinning face grinned awry, I promise you; but he recovered himself and made a brave show.

“Buon di, Ser Francesco, buon di.  You are betimes, I see.  Or is it that you are belated like my injured friend Semifonte?  The smarting of his honour has kept him from his bed, let me tell you.  But he has gone thither now, I hope, appeased.”

“You intend to appease him, I believe, in eight hours from now,” said I.  “The commissary will be at his chocolate at eight o’clock, at his office by eleven.  It is now three.”

“You are getting proficient in our tongue,” he said, somewhat put out by my exactitude.

“Oh, I am proficient in more ways than one,” I told him.  “You taught me at Prato how to draw teeth, and I showed you, in the same town, how claws could be cut.  What did you think of the carcere?  Well, now I will show you another accomplishment I have.  Draw teeth, cut claws!  I can drill holes also, Palamone.”

“What the devil are you talking about, poet?” says he, always quick to be amused.

“Why, this,” I said.  “I will come down to you in the Piazza.  We have it to ourselves.”  I held up my pistol by the nozzle.  He saw the butt.  He said, “Oho! that’s your work, is it?  You are growing in grace, Don Francis; and I am not the little man to disoblige you.  Many a score is on my slate to your name, and short scores make the longest friendships.  Come down, my son, and play a better game than faro.”

By the time I got down he had taken off his cloak and came smiling towards me with both his hands held out.  He was going to embrace me—­I knew that very well.  He would have kissed me on both cheeks, warmly and with sincerity; and then, before his arms were loosed from my neck, by a sudden surging of his lust, he would have throttled me.  All that was as clear in his looks as are the marks on this paper; but I could read my gentleman by now and was in no mood for his freakish humours.  “Take warning,” I said, “that if you move one step nearer to me I shoot you like a rabbit.”  I crooked my arm and levelled at him as I spoke.  I suppose he saw truth in the mouth of the barrel, for he stopped, and looked at me, breathing hard.

“I admire you, Francis,” he said.  “I admire you more than ever before.  If I had kissed you as I intended, you would have known it.”

“I do know it, damn you!” I replied.  “But you would have strangled me afterwards.”

“Why, so I should,” he confessed, “even as surely as I mean to shoot you now.  But that is neither here nor there.  I’m a wild, hungry old devil of a frate, but no man denies that I love a high spirit.  I should have kissed you for that, and wrung the breath out of you afterwards for a starved, misbegotten spawn of an English apothecary—­as you are, my son.  Now hand me one of those pistols of yours, and say your paternoster while you are in the mind.”