‘They call me la Buona Grazia,’[3] answered the girl.
‘Well, la Buona Grazia, I’ve got twenty scudi a month, will you come with me and be my wife?’
The girl was starving, and didn’t know where to set her foot, so she thought she could not afford to refuse; but she went along with a very bad grace, for she did not feel at all happy at the idea of marrying the ugly old hunchback.
When the hunchback saw how unhappy she was, he thought, ‘This will never do. She’s too young and too pretty to care for me. I must keep her locked up, and then when she sees no one else at all, she will at last be glad even of my company.’ So he went all the errands himself, and never let her go out except to Mass, and then he took her to the church, and watched her all the time, and brought her back himself. The windows he whitened all over, so that she couldn’t see out into the street, and there he kept her with the door locked on her, and she was very miserable.
So it went on for three years. But there was a dirty little window of a lumber room which, as it only gave a look out on to the court,[4] he had not whitened. As she happened to look out here one day a stranger stood leaning on the balcony of the court, for part of the house was an inn, and he had just arrived.
‘What are you looking for, my pretty girl?’ said the stranger.
‘O! nothing particular; only I’m locked up here, and I just looked out for a change.’
‘Locked up! who has locked you up?’ asked the stranger.
‘An old hunchback, who’s going to marry me,’ said the girl, almost crying.
‘You don’t seem much pleased at the idea of being married,’ answered the stranger.