Yet to souls less acute, there _were_ the signs: the first little shadow of a smut on the ear—a hitch, just the faintest, in the ecstatic programme of Nature. Was it that Tassino, the mean worldling, was a true prophet of his parts, and that the reaction from a starved continence was already actually threatening? Whispers there certainly were of a growing impatience of restrictions in the castello; of schisms from the pure creed of its little priest; of hankerings, even on the part of the highest, after the old fleshpots. They rose, and died down, and rose again. There was no melting a certain snow-child, it was said, into anything but ice water. The Duchess, who had somehow expected to gather flowers from frost, went about white and smiling, and chafing her hands as if they were numb. She had once stopped before a new young courtier, who bore some resemblance to a past favourite, and, while speaking to him kindly, had been seen to flush as though her cheeks had caught the sudden warmth of a distant fire. Madam Caterina, it was certain, waxing bold in impishness, had commisserated her mother on the bad cold she had caught. ’Madre mia,’ she had said, ’you have wandered too much in the chill woods, and would be the better for a hot brick to your bed.’ For such tittle-tattle was this after season of the sowing responsible, when, against all expectations, tares began to appear amidst the crops. Messer Ludovico, for his part, would recognise no sinister note in the laughter. It was just the rocking and babbling of empty vessels. Its justification in fact would not have suited his book at all; and so he continued in confidence to plant his little shafts in madam’s raw places. Monna Cat’rina, he had told her on the occasion of this particular visit, had been very saucy to her mother the evening before, advising her, this cold weather, to make herself a coverlet of angel down. ’Whereat,’ said he, ’Madam our Duchess slapped the chit’s pink knuckles, answering, "Shall I wish him, then, to die of cold for me?" to which Catherine replied: "No; for to die of love is not to die of cold"’; and the other had blushed and laughed, and turned away. And it had been this sting, thrust into the place of a long inflammation, which had finally goaded Beatrice into writing and sending her letter. VENUS AND ADONIS The days were beginning to darken early. It was the season when exotic flowers of passion luxuriate under glass, in that close coverture which is the very opposite to the law’s understanding of the term.