Page:The Chronicle of Clemendy.pdf/260

 this strange affair would have ended, if it had been left alone, is more than I can tell, but I suspect Luigi would have tired of his mistress, and have gone back quite easily and contentedly to his garret in Florence, there to put the last finish to his pastoral pieces and then to set them forth. For now he wrote verses no more, being his brain was burnt up and adust with hot passion, which could not find voice in the calmly measured and perfect sweetness of duly chosen words. But it fell out that a gentleman of the Court, near akin by blood to the Marquis of Mantua, who had formerly pressed Constance hard to no avail, and was now the lover of Agnes, by the intelligence this girl gave him, and his own wit, had come to understand how things were going between his mistress and Messer Luigi, and spied upon them constantly. In this gallant there was only one fault, and that a fixed habit of keeping old insults and bad turns in a warm, dry corner of his heart, whence every night and morning he brought forth these commodities, looked at them, and returned them again, till the time came to give them back to their rightful possessors. And since he had taken Constance's refusal of his love very grievously and had long cherished a sincere desire of crying quits with her, he began to see daylight, and to say, like the rest of the courtiers, that the poor scholar was after all an admirable sort of man; for through him he saw a door leading to the sweet desert of vengeance. And by dint of hiding in the trees by the most retired alleys, lurking behind arbours, and in the recesses of the castle stairs he