Tito had just turned his laughing face away from the whimsical painter to look down at the small drama going on among the checkered border of spectators, when at the angle of the marble steps in front of the Duomo, nearly opposite Nello’s shop, he saw a man’s face upturned towards him, and fixing on him a gaze that seemed to have more meaning in it than the ordinary passing observation of a stranger.
It was a face with tonsured head, that rose above the black mantle and white tunic of a Dominican friar—a very common sight in Florence; but the glance had something peculiar in it for Tito. There was a faint suggestion in it, certainly not of an unpleasant kind. Yet what pleasant association had he ever had with monks? None. The glance and the suggestion hardly took longer than a flash of lightning.
“Nello!” said Tito, hastily, but immediately added, in a tone of disappointment, “Ah, he has turned round. It was that tall, thin friar who is going up the steps. I wanted you to tell me if you knew aught of him?”
“One of the Frati Predicatori,” said Nello, carelessly; “you don’t expect me to know the private history of the crows.”
“I seem to remember something about his face,” said Tito. “It is an uncommon face.”
“What? you thought it might be our Fra Girolamo? Too tall; and he never shows himself in that chance way.”
“Besides, that loud-barking ‘hound of the Lord’ is not in Florence just now,” said Francesco Cei, the popular poet; “he has taken Piero de’ Medici’s hint, to carry his railing prophecies on a journey for a while.”
“The Frate neither rails nor prophesies against any man,” said a middle-aged personage seated at the other corner of the window; “he only