And with that it happened that we established a custom, and very often, almost daily, after dinner, we would repair together to the library, and I--who hitherto had no acquaintance with any save Latin works--began to make and soon to widen my knowledge of our Tuscan writers. We varied our reading. We dipped into our poets. Dante we read, and Petrarca, and both we loved, though better than the works of either--and this for the sake of the swift movement and action that is in his narrative, though his melodies, I realized, were not so pure--the Orlando of Ariosto. Sometimes we would be joined by Fifanti himself; but he never stayed very long. He had an old-fashioned contempt for writings in what he called the “dialettale,” and he loved the solemn injuvenations of the Latin tongue. Soon, as he listened, he would begin to yawn, and presently grunt and rise and depart, flinging a contemptuous word at the matter of my reading, and telling me at times that I might find more profitable amusement. But I persisted in it, guided ever by Fifanti's lady. And whatever we read by way of divergence, ever and anon we would come back to the stilted, lucid, vivid pages of Boccaccio. One day I chanced upon the tragical story of “Isabetta and the Pot of Basil,” and whilst I read I was conscious that she had moved from where she had been sitting and had come to stand behind my chair. And when I reached the point at which the heart-broken Isabetta takes the head of her murdered lover to her room, a tear fell suddenly upon my hand. I stopped, and looked up at Giuliana. She smiled at me through unshed tears that magnified her matchless eyes. “I will read no more,” I said. “It is too sad.” “Ah, no!” she begged. “Read on, Agostino! I love its sadness.” So I read on to the story's cruel end, and when it was done I sat quite still, myself a little moved by the tragedy of it, whilst Giuliana continued to lean against my chair. I was moved, too, in another way; curiously and unaccountably; and I could scarcely have defined what it was that moved me. I sought to break the spell of it, and turned the pages. “Let me read something else,” said I. “Something more gay, to dispel the sadness of this.” But her hand fell suddenly upon mine, enclasping and holding it. “Ah, no!” she begged me gently. “Give me the book. Let us read no more to-day.” I was trembling under her touch--trembling, my every nerve a-quiver and my breath shortened--and suddenly there flashed through my mind a line of Dante's in the story of Paolo and Francesca: “Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avanti.” Giuliana's words: “Let us read no more to-day”--had seemed an echo of that line, and the echo made me of a sudden conscious of an unsuspected parallel. All at once our position seemed to me strangely similar to that of the ill-starred lovers of Rimini. But the next moment I was sane again. She had withdrawn her hand, and had taken the volume to restore it to its shelf.