her so by threatening to cast her out from the bosom of the Church, that her gentle, timid mind, torn between the desire to make me happy and the fear of destroying her own soul, was suffering veritable agony. Hitherto Signora Aldini's piety had been so pliant, so tolerant, so truly Italian, that I was not a little surprised to see it become serious just at the height of one of those paroxysms of passion which seem most inconsistent with such changes. I worked hard with my poor inexperienced brain to understand this phenomenon, and I succeeded. Bianca probably loved me more than she had loved the count and the prince; but she had not sufficient courage nor a sufficiently enlightened mind to rise above public opinion. She complained of the arrogance of other people; but she gave real value to that arrogance by her fear of it. In a word, she was more submissive than anybody else to the prejudice which she had attempted for an instant to defy. She had hoped to find in the church, through the sacrament, and by redoubling her pious fervor, the strength which she failed to find in herself, and which she had not needed with her former lovers, because they were patricians and society was on their side. But now the church threatened her, society would heap maledictions upon her; to fight against the church and society at the same time was a task beyond her strength. Then too, it may be that her love subsided as soon as I became worthy of it; perhaps, instead of appreciating the grandeur of soul which had led me to descend of my own motion from the salon to the servant's quarters, she had fancied that she could detect in that courageous behavior a lack of dignity and an inborn liking for servitude. She believed too that the threats and sarcasms of her other servants had frightened me. She was astonished to find that I was not ambitious, and that very absence of ambition seemed to her an indication of an inert or timid spirit. She did not admit all this to me; but as soon as I was once on the track I divined it all. I was not angry. How could she understand my noble pride and my sensitive honor, she who had accepted and returned the love of an Aldini and a Lanfranchi? Doubtless she ceased to consider me handsome when I refused to wear lace and ribbons. My hands, calloused in her service, no longer seemed to her worthy to press hers. She had loved me as a gondolier, in the thought and hope of transforming me into an attractive cicisbeo; but the instant that I insisted upon reverting to the system of a fair exchange of services between her and myself, all her illusions vanished, and she saw in me only the vulgar fisherman's son of Chioggia, a species of stupid and hard-working beast of burden.