For once in a way, report turned out to be true, in both the cases just mentioned.  Invitations were actually issued from the Melani Palace, and Fabio returned from abroad to his home on the Arno.

In settling all the arrangements connected with his masked ball, the Marquis Melani showed that he was determined not only to deserve, but to increase, his reputation for oddity.  He invented the most extravagant disguises, to be worn by some of his more intimate friends; he arranged grotesque dances, to be performed at stated periods of the evening by professional buffoons, hired from Florence.  He composed a toy symphony, which included solos on every noisy plaything at that time manufactured for children’s use.  And not content with thus avoiding the beaten track in preparing the entertainments at the ball, he determined also to show decided originality, even in selecting the attendants who were to wait on the company.  Other people in his rank of life were accustomed to employ their own and hired footmen for this purpose; the marquis resolved that his attendants should be composed of young women only; that two of his rooms should be fitted up as Arcadian bowers; and that all the prettiest girls in Pisa should be placed in them to preside over the refreshments, dressed, in accordance with the mock classical taste of the period, as shepherdesses of the time of Virgil.

The only defect of this brilliantly new idea was the difficulty of executing it.  The marquis had expressly ordered that not fewer than thirty shepherdesses were to be engaged—­fifteen for each bower.  It would have been easy to find double this number in Pisa, if beauty had been the only quality required in the attendant damsels.  But it was also absolutely necessary, for the security of the marquis’s gold and silver plate, that the shepherdesses should possess, besides good looks, the very homely recommendation of a fair character.  This last qualification proved, it is sad to say, to be the one small merit which the majority of the ladies willing to accept engagements at the palace did not possess.  Day after day passed on; and the marquis’s steward only found more and more difficulty in obtaining the appointed number of trustworthy beauties.  At last his resources failed him altogether; and he appeared in his master’s presence about a week before the night of the ball, to make the humiliating acknowledgment that he was entirely at his wits’ end.  The total number of fair shepherdesses with fair characters whom he had been able to engage amounted only to twenty-three.

“Nonsense!” cried the marquis, irritably, as soon as the steward had made his confession.  “I told you to get thirty girls, and thirty I mean to have.  What’s the use of shaking your head when all their dresses are ordered?  Thirty tunics, thirty wreaths, thirty pairs of sandals and silk stockings, thirty crooks, you scoundrel—­and you have the impudence to offer me only twenty-three hands to hold them.  Not a word!  I won’t hear a word!  Get me my thirty girls, or lose your place.”  The marquis roared out this last terrible sentence at the top of his voice, and pointed peremptorily to the door.