On the last day of the Carnival, between ten and eleven in
the morning, Bomola walked out, according to promise,
towards the Corso degli Albizzi, to fetch her cousin Brigida,
that they might both be ready to start from the Via de* Bardi
early in the afternoon, and take their places at a window
which Tito had had reserved for them in the Piazza della
Signoria, where there was to be a scene of so new and striking
a sort, that all Florentine eyes must desire to see it. For the
Hagnoni were having their own way thoroughly about the
mode of keeping the CamivaL In vain Dolfo Spini and his
companions had struggled to get up the dear old masques and
practical jokes, well spiced with indecency. Such things were
not to be in a city where Christ had been declared king.
Bomola set out in that languid state of mind with which,
every one enters on a long day of sight-seeing purely for the
sake ofgratifying a child, or some dear childish friend. The
day was certainly an epoch in carnival -keeping; but this
phase of reform had not touched her enthusiasm: and she did
not know that it was an epoch in her own life when another
lot would begin to be no longer secretly but visibly entwined
with her own.
