the passers-by on the high-road glance freely at her. I could have struck to earth even my best I friend amongst our own company when over-easily he parried jests and exchanged gay phrases with her.
"You are a simpleton, Piccinino," the chief of my troop said to me. "Chance has given you, in your wife, a lantern of Aladdin. But in lieu of using the brightness of your lamp to get you gold, you hide it and bury it in your bosom."
I understood him: he never said it twice to me. Nor were we ever after friends.
My comrades did not regard me with all their old careless amity,—any one of them.
"Have a care!" I heard them say one to another. "Our old dancing-dog, Piccinino, can growl—ay, and bite, too, it seems. One used to be able to plague him on all sides: he never turned; but now———"
And yet I do not think that I was jealous of her in any foolish or barbarous manner then. I begrudged her no pleasure that came through others. I would have had her happy at any privation to me of body or of mind. I loved her to trick out her delicate beauty in all the fantasies she would, and make it radiant in the eyes of all men. But when a man is as ugly as I am, and regards the creature that he loves as I regarded her, with
