Two dark shadows hovered over the flame, fighting, as it seemed, and twining round each other, and wrestling and dashing each other to and fro: yells of despair and peals of scornful laughter resounded alternately between the pauses of the loudly raving storm.
It was a long time before Antonio could collect calmness enough to go and seek for the house of the old woman according to the directions he had received. He found her drest out; and she cried to him merrily: "What! Florentine! are you too come to see me again at last?"
"Where is your daughter?" askt Antonio, trembling with anxiety.
"If you wish to have her now," replied the old woman, "I won't keep her from you. But you must pay honestly for her, you or the Podesta of Padua, if he still lives; for she is his child, whom I stole from him long since, because the Marconis vouchsafed me a round sum of money for doing so."
"If you can prove it," said the youth, "you shall have whatever you ask."
"Proofs, as many as you please," cried the beldam: "trinkets with arms on them, clothes she had on at the time, a mole on her right shoulder, which of course her mother must know best. But you shall also have letters from the Marconis, writings which I carried off with her from Padua in my hurry, everything ... only money must be forthcoming."
Antonio paid her all that he had about him, and then gave her the jewels from his hat and clothes, some pearls, and a gold chain. She swept it all in laughing, while she said: "Don't be surprised that I am in such haste, and so easily satisfied. The wench has run away from me, because she was determined not to have any lover, and has stuck herself into the nunnery beside Trajan's column: the abbess would not give her up to me; but only send in your name, and the young chit will jump into your arms; for she dreams and thinks of nothing but you; you have so bewitcht her silly heart, that ever since that night, which you will probably remember, she has not spoken a single word of sense, and can't bear to hear the mention of a lover or a husband. I am glad to be quit of her in this way; I am going with my noble cousin, Signor Beresynth, who came of his own accord to invite me, this very night to his villa. Fare thee well young man! good luck attend you with your Crescentia!"