“Now, Dr. Lanfranchi,” said I, with a glance at my sword, “I am ready for you how and when you please.”

With a howl like that of a miserable maniac he leapt upon me, tripped and threw me flat upon the flags.  I remember the stunning shock of my fall, but remember no more.  I learned afterwards that he had pitched me out on to the stairs, and that I fell far.

CHAPTER VI

I COMMENCE PILGRIM

I arose from bed, some two or three days after the terrible occurrence related—­and how I had got into it, except for the charity of the doorkeeper, there’s no telling.  I arose, I say, to a new heaven and a new earth:  a heaven impossibly remote, an earth of sickly horror, an earth of serpents and worms, upon which I crawled and groped, the loathliest of their spawn.  I surveyed myself in the glass, faced myself as I was—­I the wrecker of homes, the betrayer of ladies, love’s atheist!  Pale, hollow-cheeked, with eyes distraught, there was good ground for believing that when Dr. Lanfranchi threw me upon my worthless skull he had jogged out my wits.

The facts were otherwise, however.  Resolution came back upon the crest, as it were, of the wave that brought me full knowledge; the more disastrously showed the ruin I had made, the more stoutly I determined to repair it.

The surgeon who attended me was perfectly discreet and told me nothing more than that Professor Lanfranchi had left Padua and was gone to Venice.  Not so the custode of the house:  it was from him I had the rest.  Dr. Lanfranchi had taken his keys with him and had left no directions.  Donna Aurelia had been twice to the house since her first departure from it, and had been unable to get access.  The second time of failing, said the custode, she had “lashed into the street like a serpent from a cage.  And nobody,” he added, “nobody in this town, and nobody under heaven’s great eye, can say where she has gone.  Perhaps she is dead, sir; but I believe that she is not.  Pretty and snug lady that she was, it’s my belief she will fret after her comforts, and that if she get them not from one, she will have them from another.”  Old Nonna had also disappeared, he said, which was better than things might have been; but the strongest ray of comfort shed upon me from this worthy fellow’s store was this, that Donna Aurelia had returned to her house.  Plainly, if she had been thither twice, she could be induced thither a third time.  It must then be my business to induce her, and to see to it, if possible, that she was properly received upon that occasion.