Meantime that year of new experience, uplifting love and growth by inches must ever remain wonderful to me—­with Aurelia’s music in my ears and Love’s wild music in my heart.  Happy, happy days of my youth!

“Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados!” cried the knight of La Mancha; and I may call that Paduan year my age of song.  It ran its course to the sound of flutes, harps, and all sweet music.  I never knew, until I knew Aurelia, that such exulting tides of melody could pour from human throat.

When Aurelia rose in the morning and threw open her green shutters, if the sunlight was broad upon the Pra, flecked upon the trees, striking the domes and pinnacles of the Santo with fire, she sang full diapason with that careless fling of the voice, that happy rapture, that bravura which makes the listener’s heart go near to burst with her joy.  If rain made the leaves to droop, or scudded in sheets along the causeways, she sang plaintively, the wounded, aggrieved, hurt notes of the nightingale.  Her song then would be some old-remembered sorrow of her land—­of Ginevra degli Almieri, the wandering wife; of the Donna Lombarda, who poisoned her lover; or of the Countess Costanza’s violated vow.  So she shared confidences with the weather, and so unbosomed herself to nature and to God.  Meantime she was as busy as a nesting-bird.  She made her doctor’s chocolate, and took it in to him with the gazette or the news-sheet; she would darn a hole in my stocking, on my leg, without pricking me at all, look me over, brush me, re-tie my hair, pat me into order with a critical eye, and send me off to my classes or study with a sage counsel to mind my books, and a friendly nod over her shoulder as we each went our ways.  She would go to mass at the Santo, to market in the Piazza; she would cheapen a dress-length, chat with a priest, admonish old Nonna, the woman of the house—­all before seven o’clock in the morning; and not before then would she so much as sip a glass of coffee or nibble a crust of bread.  On Sundays and Festas she took her husband’s arm and went to church as befitted, wearing her glazed gown of silver grey, her black lace zendado.  She took a fan as well as a service-book—­ and happy was I to carry them for her; she had lace mittens on her hands and a fine three-cornered hat on her head.  She looked then what she truly was, the thrifty young housewife, who, if she was as lovely as the summer’s dawn, was so only by the way.  And thrifty she proved herself.  For when she had kneeled and crossed herself twice towards the altar, she pulled up the shining silk gown all about her middle and sat down upon her petticoat.

Exquisite, fragrant, piteous Aurelia!  Is it wonderful that I loved her?  And who was I—­O heaven!  What sort of lover was I to disturb her sweetly ordered life?  To that I must next address myself, cost me what it may.

CHAPTER III