You would have supposed that she could hardly have misunderstood the state of my affairs, had I said or done nothing.  So quick-witted was she, it is inconceivable.  But as time went on, and success with it, I quite got out of the way of concealment, and spoke of myself openly as her slave.  She used to laugh at me, pretend to think me an absurd boy; and now and then threatened (and that half in jest) to tell her husband.  I know very well that she never did.  The padron, we used to call him to each other, having taken the name from old Nonna.  It was one of our little foolish jokes to pretend the house an inn, he the landlord, and ourselves travellers met there by hazard.  We had a many familiar, private sayings and nicknames of the sort, secret cues to look across the table when he was there, and smile at each other—­as when he railed (as he was fond of doing) at Tuscan ways and speech, at the usage of Siena, her own country, or when (after his meal) he made a noise, sucking his teeth.  Sweetly pleasant, dangerous days—­were they as lovely to her as to me?  How can I tell?  There was no doubt but she knew me thoroughly.  The little pleasant encroachments of mine, stolen upon her unawares, were now never checked—­I am speaking of the end of my first year, when I could hold her hand unreproved, and kiss it as often as I pleased.  I took and kept, and exhibited to her without embarrassment, little trifles of hers—­a hair-ribbon, a garter, a little trodden Venice slipper; if she asked for them back, it only provoked me to keep them closer to my heart.  She saw no harm in these foolish, sweet things:  she felt herself to be my senior; by comparison with her position, mine was that of a child.  To the very end she maintained the fiction that she was my foster-mother, responsible to my parents for my advancement in education and morals.  Assuredly she taught me her tongue and kept me out of gross iniquity; but equally certain is it that I learned more than Italian.

I learned, however, to be very fluent in that, for, inspired by love of Aurelia, I attacked it with extraordinary passion.  All Italy, and above all Tuscany, took sacred air from her; there grew to be an aureole about everything which owned kinship with her.  I was a severe ritualist, as every lover is:  it became a blasphemy in me to think of Aurelia in any form of words but those of her own honey tongue.  And that was of the purest in the land.  She had very little Venetian at any time, and kept what she had for her husband and household management.  To me she employed her native speech, not the harsh staccato of Florence, a stringent compound of the throat and the teeth, but the silken caressing liquids of Siena, the speech of women to their lovers, of St. Catherine to her Spouse.  So I became expert in Tuscan, and after the same fashion in Tuscany also.  She was deeply and burningly proud of that land of art and letters; she knew something of its history, something (if not much) of its monuments.  Such as it was