Tomaso, tossing his hair back from his face, with parted lips, stepped close, followed by Vittore.
"Son! Tomaso!" cried the traveler. He seized him by the shoulders with trembling hands, and scanned eagerly his face.
"Tomaso!" and his voice was shrill with feeling, "Tomaso at last!"
They had not met for many months and years--two at least; the father, absent at a distant court, serving where chance had led him, for fame and fortune; the son, growing from boyhood into man in distant Florence.
Since Verona fell, Tomaso had mourned his father as dead, and he, in his turn, had wandered far, searching for the pair who had started out to find him.
With stifled sobs of joy, Tomaso clung about his father's neck, and was clasped to him in frenzied pleasure.
"They said thou wert dead, father!" broke out the youth at last. "I never thought to see thy face again."
"I thought the same of thee, my son," returned Ligozzi tenderly. "I have been searching for traces of thee long and wearily. I thought thou must have perished on thy long journey, having found out Verona had fallen. But is this Vittore?" He drew to him paternally the boy who, so far, had watched the scene with wide-eyed curiosity.
"And now, what art thou doing--and where staying?"
As if he feared to lose him, Tomaso held his father tightly by the sleeve, over which the bridle had been slipped, and Vittore clinging to the other hand, they drew him forward between them to the place from which they had come.
"I am glad thou art not dead," said Vittore; "Tomaso grieved for thee sorely, and so did I."
Tomaso laughed happily. "Grieve! Aye, did we! But now we can rejoice."
"But why this haste?" Ligozzi asked, "where dost thou hurry me?"
"Back, father, whence we came, for I was left in trust. It is a path thy horse can follow, and I will tell thee what has happened as we go."
Ligozzi followed without further question, too full of joy for speech, and taking so much pleasure in that it was his son who spoke as for the moment not to heed too keenly what he said.
But when Tomaso, beginning, boy-fashion, with the last, and not the first, came to mention of the Visconti's blow, Ligozzi roused to fury.
"Methought I saw a scar across thy face," he said, "yet in this light I could not see too well. It is only one more wrong to set against the Visconti's name, one deed the more to be avenged."