Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/319

Rh girl, therefore, she thought of the Count as little as possible; still less of another sinister apparition, that of the obsequious Captain Mosca, craning his lean neck round the corners of her vision, grinning from ear to ear.

Free of the Schifanoia (whose dust he was yet careful to keep upon his shoes for the sake of her it harboured), Angioletto walked briskly down the street, shaping his course for the Borgo. He had been rounding a plan even while he was announcing to Bellaroba that he had it cut and dried; and now he was to execute it. True, it was a little extravagant, depended too much, perhaps, upon other people's estimations of him tallying with his own; but you will have found out by this time that the youth was a realist. Ideas stood for things with him; and, as he said, if he could not make them stand so to his auditory he was no poet. This was a heresy he could not allow even supposititiously. The idea was excellent; the thing, therefore, no less. Therefore he concluded that he should not fail of his plan.

Beyond the Porta Angeli, in Borso's day, was to be found a huddle of tenements—fungus-growth upon the city wall—single-storied, single-roomed affairs, mostly the lodging of artificers in the lesser crafts. Among them all there was but one of two floors, a substantial red-brick little house with a most grandiloquent chimney-stack. And very rightly it was so, for it belonged to the Court chimney-sweep.

On this eventful noon Sor Beppo, the sweep, was sitting on his doorstep in the sun, eating an