The poor girl was trembling, though she spoke steadily enough and looked at me with unfaltering eyes.  But she was grave and I horrified.

“But what,”—­I began—­“what do you mean, child?  The marchese—­your—­oh, horrible thought!  Is this the blackest treachery?”

“Fra Palamone finds me in his way,” said Virginia, “and wishes to have you to himself in Florence.  He thinks that I know too much about him, and has told the marchese that I am here.  He wishes to get rid of me by some simple means.  Nor could he have hit upon a better.  Well,” she said, looking gently at me, “I am in your hands.  Shall I go?”

I hurried her off at once to our inn, the Sparrow-hawk, where I was lucky enough to find the padrona, Monna Bianca by name.  She was a buxom woman of forty summers, good-tempered, an excellent manager of house and husband, and not unreasonably proud of her discernment.  She had found me out, she had told me, in the twinkling of an eye.  I was a gentleman, either English or Irish, and (as she put it) had my leg in the wrong bed.  Supposing my affair to be one very common to her experience, she had begun by deploring my weakness for Virginia, whom she had called Robaccia, Cosa di Niente, and the like; but I had cut her short by telling her the whole of my own story and part of the girl’s.  She had at once admitted her mistake, begged my pardon, taken a fancy to me, and now proved a good friend in this urgent need.

I told her the shameful turn of affairs, and begged her to take care of Virginia while I was employed in challenging the marchese to fight, and, if possible, in running him through the body.  I said that if she had had the eyes to see my masquerade, it was not to be supposed that Semifonte would misunderstand me; but she stopped me at once.  “Do no such thing, Don Francis,” said she.  “You will be attacking the wrong man.  The marchese is no better than he should be, but he is perfectly galant’ uomo, and would throw no sort of difficulty in your way.  But you are crediting him with too much zeal.  He has many irons in the fire, as we say; and, after all, Miss Virginia is not the only wench in the world.”

“Per Bacco,” said Virginia, “that’s true.”

“Your aim,” Monna Bianca continued, “should be that old sack of iniquity, Fra Palamone, the most wily, audacious rogue of a friar in all a friar-ridden land.  Now, I’ll help you there—­I and your Virginia together.  Leave us, Don Francis, leave us alone for a while.  Take the air, avoid the marchese, and by the morning you shall hear some news.”

Such indeed proved to be the case.  The Grand Duke Cosimo, it seems, on the pressure of his friends the Jesuits, had published an edict, which was then in full force, that any man entering a house where a marriageable woman might be living could be arrested and imprisoned without trial. [Footnote:  Mr. Strelley is perfectly right.  One of the first acts of Gian Gastone, Cosimo’s successor, was