For the plighting of it, Virginia took all the order and direction.  I remember that she left me for a short time sitting there on the church steps, and returned with bread and salt, got I know not how or whence.  She broke the bread, sprinkled it with the salt, and initiated me into a mystical meal of her own devising.

“This old church under which we partake our sacrament,” she told me, “is called San Pietro’s.  It is here that, in times gone by, the Bishop of Pistoja went through the ceremony of a mystical marriage with the Abbess of the Benedictines, which has now been stopped by the Jesuits, because, more than once, it was not so mystical a business as it might have been.  But I think the place very suitable for what you and I have to do.”

With certain rites, then, of her own contriving—­certain sprinklings of salt in a ring upon the ground about us, upon our heads and knees, with certain balancing of flakes of bread, and many signs of the Cross, Virginia and I celebrated a union which, I say with my hand on my heart, was intended by both of us to be as mystical as possible, and was so until, long afterwards, it was deliberately ended.  At the end of her observances she took my hands in each of hers, crosswise, and looking earnestly at me, said, “We are now indissolubly bound together—­by the communion of bread and salt—­my pure intention to your pure desire.  Together we will live until we find Aurelia—­you as master, I as servant—­you vowed to preserve my soul, I to succour your body.  Let nothing henceforward separate us—­but one thing.”

“Amen to that, Virginia,” I said, “and that one thing shall be a prosperous marriage for you.”

So the bargain was struck; and now again I looked at the girl.  The hard and bitter fires had burned themselves out of her eyes; nothing remained there but a clear radiancy.  She was like a new creature, earnest, frosty cold, like a spirit set free.  I have said she was handsome in a thin, fine way.  She was very pale, black-browed, with firm, pure lips, a sharp chin, grey, judging eyes.  She was lithe and spare like a boy, and very strong.  Her hair, which was abundant and loosely coiled upon the nape of her neck, was nearly black; not of that soft, cloudy dark which made Aurelia’s so glorious, but as if burnt, with a hot, rusty tinge here and there about it.  Though not now in the rags in which I saw her first, she was still poorly dressed, in the habit of the peasantry of that country, in a green petticoat and red bodice, which, like that of all unmarried girls here, was cut to display the bosom.  Her feet were bare, and her arms also to the arm-pits.

Such was Virginia Strozzi, for whom I had not then any symptom of what the world calls love.  I do not deny that she interested me extremely, and was of great comfort and assistance, nor that, as the reader will soon see, I gave her, and with good reason, respect, gratitude, a strong affection—­as much of these as a man can give to any woman born.  Of her feelings towards me at this time I shall not attempt any relation.  She herself had said that she loved me.  Whether she meant by that more than a sympathetic affection, a common cause, an adventure shared, a comradeship, I know not—­or at least I did not know then.  All I have to add is, that she never betrayed it.