sights and sounds and dangers with which the
plague-stricken city was rife.

The only source of interest, moreover, which
remained to her outside the doors of her home,
was very shortly taken from her. For poor
Pasquale Bassi was stricken by the pestilence in
the last days of its virulence, and followed, as he
said he should, his wife and son to the grave.

Thus Caterina was left alone in the world
with her aged husband.

And by the spring of the next year the plague
had ceased. The Miserecordia bell was no
longer heard booming its sinister call over the
city almost every hour of the day and night.
Valdarno and its enclosing hills were once more
bright and smiling with the promise of abundant
corn, wine, and oil. The extreme pressure of
scarcity decreased gradually; and the Florentines
made haste to forget the black days through
which they had passed.

But all this brought no change to the monotonous
dreamy life of the inmates of the still
old house in the Via dei Pilastri. There the
noontide meal and the evening meal still followed
each other with imperturbable regularity, and
the morning and the evening made up each uneventful
day, unvaried save by the Sunday and
Feast-day visits to the neighbouring church of
Sant' Ambrogio. And Caterina, having left a
year behind her the anxieties, the privations,
and the labour of her maiden life, was now in
her seventeenth year, though somewhat paled,
like a flower shut from the sunlight, more
beautiful than ever.

But unfailing succession of dinners and suppers,
even though the prospect of such be
stretched out with unbroken continuity into the
future, will not—so perversely constituted is
the human heart—suffice to ensure happiness or
even placid contentment. Especially they fail
to do so to a heart and mind of just seventeen
years' experience of life. It was in vain that
Caterina, marvelling at the change that was
creeping over her, strove to call back her
imagination to the days when such tranquil
security as that of her present life appeared to
her a haven of rest, beyond which she had
nothing to ask of fate. In vain she taxed herself
with capricious fickleness, and questioned
her heart as to the causes of the change. She
could not understand it. But the fact was
there. An unspeakable weariness seemed to
extend itself from day to day, like a spreading
dry-rot, over her life. It all seemed empty.
There was a feeling of a great craving void in
her heart, craving unmistakably; but craving for
what? She spent dull idle hours in wearily thinking
over the question, and found no answer to it.

* * * *

Thus much of the story to be told may be authentically
gathered out of the chronicles, which
have preserved for us this specimen bit, cut out
from the life of the seventeenth century. At this
point the slide is suddenly withdrawn from the
magic lantern; the light is put out; and the house
in the Via dei Pilastri, with its inmates, vanish
into darkness. The next slide projects on
the magic circumscribed circle of light, a scene
some four years later in date. There would be
very little difficulty in filling up the chasm between
the two periods with very satisfactory
assurance of truthfulness. But as the reader
can do this for himself quite as well as the
writer could do it for him, and as it is intended
to present here only what is warranted by the
record, the raree-show shall reopen with the
spring of 1638.

* * * *

Five years have elapsed since we left Caterina,
in her seventeenth year, "doing her duty " to
her husband, then in his seventieth. She is
now twenty-two and he seventy-five—and the
wifely duty has become somewhat simplified.
For, five years beyond the three score and ten
make deep marks in their passage.

It was the third hour of the night, as the old
chronicles have it, reckoning after the Italian
manner—not yet abandoned in remote parts of
the country—from sundown, which was called
"the twenty-four"—the third hour of the night
in Casa Canacci, which at that season of the
year must have been about ten o'clock. The
mistress of the house was in a sitting-room on
the ground floor, at the back of it, looking into
a very small garden; and was occupied, assisted
by a neat and pretty maid-servant, some five or
six years older than herself, in preparing a table
for supper.

The five years, which had sped Ser Giustino
so rapidly onward in his down-hill path, had
apparently done little or nothing towards advancing
his beautiful wife on her way to
the top of it. She was, if anything, more
lovely than ever. Something, perhaps, may
have been due to the style of her attire,
which was strikingly different from what it had
been in the first years of her married life. It
had then been almost monastic in its unadorning
simplicity. Now, without making any pretence
to the splendour which was then in
vogue among the noble and wealthy, it was
entirely modish in fashion, and worn with that
provocative grace which is the prerogative
of those women only, who, in the envious language
of those ungifted with it, "lay themselves
out for admiration." Somewhat also of increased
charm may have been attributable to a
very evident change of mind, and consequent
change of manner. The old dull listlessness
was gone. The heavy vacant eye had acquired
brightness and animation. The languid weary-seeming
step had become brisk and alert. All
the old passivity and apathetic sense of the
emptiness of life had vanished. Something had
evidently come into the circle of her life which
had given it an interest and zest of some sort.
Yet any observer, whose attention had been
sharpened by a real interest in the young wife's
welfare, would hardly have been satisfied with
her manner and bearing. Hers was not the air
that speaks of tranquil happiness and well-assured
contentment. The bright eye was too
brilliant. Was there the fever of excitement in it?
The alert step was too alert. Did its