father! That was my greatest dread. With Ser
Giustino I shall do very well, doubt it not. He
means well; and I will do my duty by him.
But I am loth to leave you, my father—all
alone here," she added, with a glance round
the desolate room, "and in such times, too!"

"I have got it in my head, Caterina mia, that
it is I who will leave you before long. And
you may guess whether my mind is easier at
the thought of leaving you, at least in a safe and
honourable home."

"My own darling father! do not talk in that
manner. All will yet be well. These dreadful days
will pass away, the business will revive, and we
shall talk over the bad time of the pestilence
often of a winter evening in Casa Canacci."

"So be it, my child!" returned the broken-spirited
father, striving to shake off his depression
and black presentiments. "So be it, my
own Caterina! And now, darling, I must go
to our good friend Beppo Fierli, to tell him to
see Messer Giustino's lawyer on our part."

And Caterina was again left in complete solitude
to meditate on the new life before her.

Thus was definitively settled the marriage of
the loveliest girl in Florence—for such all the
old chroniclers, who have recorded these facts,
agree in declaring her to have been—in her
sixteenth year, with a dirty, disagreeable, mean-minded
old man, aged enough to be her grandfather.
And Heaven was called on to bless the
union; and the parties to the monstrous bargain
hoped that good would come to them of
it; and Caterina went to her new home honestly
meaning to "do her duty" by her husband.

CHAPTER II. A FLORENTINE HOME IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

So Messer Giustino Canacci—or dei Canacci—
for it would seem from some of the chronicles
that he was entitled to the "particle noble,"
which indicated his patrician birth and quality—
Messer Giustino dei Canacci bought his lovely
young wife dirt cheap, in consequence of the
hardness of the times, and the depression of the
market for that as for other articles. And
pretty Caterina Bassi, who, as her father said,
with perfect truth, had for sixteen years been
as good a girl and dutiful a daughter as parents
could wish to have, the stay of their age and the
sunshine of their house—pretty innocent
Caterina went to her new home very thoughtfully,
purposing, as she said, "to do her duty"
by her septuagenarian husband.

What precisely was her idea of this duty to
be done, it might probably be somewhat difficult
to investigate. It, of course, was the result of
the teaching, avowed and unavowed, conscious
and unconscious, which she had received from
the religious theories and the social practices in
vogue around her. This much, however, is at all
events clear, that according to Nature's view
of the matter, poor Caterina might as well
have undertaken to do her duty as Emperor of
China. What could have been her duty in the
matter, unless to every proposition of such
marriage to oppose utter and unbending refusal.
"No! It is in flagrant opposition to the
supreme law, the clearest, most indubitable,
most unchangeable law of God! Ever no!
Death rather!" But how could the performance
of any such duty as this be expected from a
poor little sixteen-year-old subject of Ferdinando
de' Medici, and docile daughter of
Mother Church? A loveless marriage is a sin
against nature, fatal, irremedial, from which no
good, but evil only and further sin, can arise—on
which no blessing can be hoped—a sin excusable
by no conceivable circumstances—justifiable
by no plea whatsoever of antagonistic or antecedent
obligations. But if, strange as it is, this
eternal truth is not invariably recognised, and
universally acted on even in enlightened nineteenth-century
England, what could be expected
from seventeenth-century Catholic Florence!
And the worst of it is, that the moral government
of this world is like the law that governs
a long arithmetical operation. One figure wrong
in the top line, and your whole sum comes out
hopelessly wrong in every part. Actions will
produce their proper necessary and ordained
consequences. A wrong step, moralists constantly
tell us, ever increases the difficulty of
stepping aright afterwards. But it is the special
penalty attached to some false steps, that they
render a perfectly upright walk for the future
impossible. An error has come into the calculation.
The sum cannot, thenceforward, be
worked correctly.

So Caterina went to the decent and respectable
old family house of the Canacci, in the Via dei
Pilastri, to do her unnatural and impossible duty.

Old Giustino, on his part, seems to have performed
the conditions under which he effected
his purchase. The brutal drunkard, Bartolommeo,
ceased to be an inmate of the house,
though his occasional visits continued to be a
source of trouble to Caterina; but not more, or
perhaps so much so, as to the old man himself.
The "safe and assured bed and board" had been
duly forthcoming. The mid-day meal and the
evening supper followed each other with the
most monotonously regular certainty; and there
were no anxieties on this score for the morrow.
In prospect this had appeared to the ruined
artisan's daughter in her naked home, to be well-nigh
all that was needed for happiness on earth.
The hopes and aspirations of the storm-tossed
seaman in imminent danger of wreck, limit
themselves to the safety and repose of the harbour.
And for a while the security of the
asylum she had reached seemed to fill in the
fruition of it all the space in her mind which it
had occupied when looked forward to from amid
the risks and perils of her previous position;
the more so that she had found herself able, in
one way or another, to afford some assistance to
her father.

The dead solitude, too, in which she lived in
Casa Canacci, and the strictly home-keeping
habits, which fell in with Signor Giustino's ways
and wishes, appeared in those early days of her
married life to add to the grateful sense of
security by shutting out all those miserable