She was silent for a few minutes, then knelt down and kissed my hand.  When I raised her up and embraced her, I found tears on her cheeks.  We walked home in the dark without another word said, and I prevailed upon Gioiachino to convey my challenge, though he did what he could to dissuade me.  “This,” he said, “is madness.  Do you not know that the less your man is assured of his gentility the more exacting he will be in the profession of it?  Do you know what will occur?  He will call for some lacquey or another to kick me downstairs.”

My answer to that was that such conduct to the bearer of a gentleman’s cartel was unheard of.  I added that if the cavaliere prided himself, against all evidence, upon being a gentleman, he was not at all likely to convict himself of being a ruffian.  Very ruefully, in the end, the good-natured Gioiachino went out to oblige me.

It happens that I was right, or had good grounds for thinking so.  The cavaliere received the poor fellow with perfect affability, and after a short colloquy with some of his companions, introduced a certain Prince Gandolfo Dolfini, with whom Gioiachino was to arrange a meeting in the fields for seven o’clock on the Wednesday morning.  The cavaliere having the choice of weapons, his friend the prince decided for whips.

If this was to make me feel ridiculous it failed.  I was much too angry.  “Whips he shall have,” said I, and went to bed.

On the morning appointed I rose at my usual hour and went to the workshop, intending to go on with my duties until the time appointed.  I left Virginia in tears, and Teresa, no less wretched, clinging to her in her bed.  At a quarter before seven, Gioiachino with me, armed with a stout cart-whip, I left the Porta del Vescovo and walked briskly over one or two water-meadows towards a retired grove of trees not far from the Pisa road.  I flattered myself that we were first in the field; but there I was mistaken.  I found a numerous company assembled—­tall persons in cocked hats, coats and badges, a posse of police, and the villainous cavaliere smirking in the midst.  So soon as we entered the grove he pointed to me with his cane and said in a loud voice:  “There, Signor Sindaco, there is the fugitive assassin, the betrayer of an innocent girl.  Speed him back to Tuscany with the added wages he has richly earned in Lucca.”  The police advanced, seized me, bound my wrists.  An old gentleman without teeth read a long legal instrument without stops, at the end of which I was stripped to the shirt, horsed upon Gioiachino’s back and vigorously whipped.  I was then haled by my harsh executioners some league or more over the marshes to the confines of the Republic of Lucca and told to take myself out of sight unless I wished for more taste of the whip.  Without prayers, without words, without a coat, without money, rich in nothing but innocence and despair, I reached the hillside and flung myself face downwards upon the sward.  There I lay far into the night.