"'the pile which the mighty shadow makes,
For Via Largo is three-parts light,
But the palace overshadows one,
Because of a crime which may God requite!'
"This crime was the murder of Duke Alessandro by his distant cousin Lorenzino, and this, you see, fixes the fact beyond dispute that the feast was given by the Duke in this great Riccardi palace on the Square of San Lorenzo. Isn't it all wonderful and thrilling, and is there any place in the world so filled to the very brim with interest and romance as Florence?"
"No place except Rome," said Angela, true to her first love.
"Yes, but the history seems less remote here; everything seems nearer and closer, more intimate—you understand what I mean, Margaret."
When Zelphine appeared at the lunch table, flushed with the joy of victory and quite ready to annihilate her scoffing adversary, whom Angela disrespectfully designated as "Red-top," she found, to her dismay, that the lady had left for Venice before noon. This is surely one of the incompletenesses of life. To think of that misguided woman proceeding on her way to scatter misinformation broadcast, when Zelphine could have set her right in five minutes!
When Bertha heard of Zelphine's disappointment, she was most sympathetic, and proposed, as a congenial and solacing occupation, that we should return that afternoon to the Square of San Lorenzo and try to find the old stall where Mr. Browning, on a memorable June day, bought for a lira the little volume that contained the whole story of "The Ring and the Book."
The piazza, a market for old clothes, old furniture, and all manner of cooking-utensils, still answers to Mr. Browning's description, and here, close to the statue, which is of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, father of the first Cosimo, is just such a table full of nondescript rubbish as the one upon which the poet found the parchment-covered book which furnished him with his plot. Then at Bertha's suggestion, to humor our fancies as to the associations of the time and place, we followed in the poet's footsteps, as he described himself, walking and reading,