GUIDO: I think it must be here. (Goes up to passer-by and doffs his cap.) Pray, sir, is this the market place, and that the church of Santa Croce? (Citizen bows.) I thank you, sir.

ASCANIO: Well?

GUIDO: Ay! It is here.

ASCANIO: I would it were somewhere else, for I see no wine-shop.

GUIDO (taking a letter from his pocket and reading it): ‘The hour noon; the city, Padua; the place, the market; and the day, Saint Philip’s Day.’

ASCANIO: And what of the man, how shall we know him?

GUIDO (reading still): ‘I will wear a violet cloak with a silver falcon broidered on the shoulder.’ A brave attire, Ascanio.

ASCANIO: I’d sooner have my leathern jerkin. And you think he will tell you of your father?

GUIDO: Why, yes! It is a month ago now, you remember; I was in the vineyard, just at the corner nearest the road, where the goats used to get in, a man rode up and asked me was my name Guido, and gave me this letter, signed ‘Your Father’s Friend,’ bidding me be here to-day if I would know the secret of my birth, and telling me how to recognise the writer! I had always thought old Pedro was my uncle, but he told me that he was not, but that I had been left a child in his charge by some one he had never since seen.

ASCANIO: And you don’t know who your father is?

GUIDO: No.

ASCANIO: No recollection of him even?

GUIDO: None, Ascanio, none.

ASCANIO (laughing): Then he could never have boxed your ears so often as my father did mine.

GUIDO (smiling): I am sure you never deserved it.

ASCANIO: Never; and that made it worse. I hadn’t the consciousness of guilt to buoy me up. What hour did you say he fixed?

GUIDO: Noon. (Clock in the Cathedral strikes.)

ASCANIO: It is that now, and your man has not come. I don’t believe in him, Guido. I think it is some wench who has set her eye at you; and, as I have followed you from Perugia to Padua, I swear you shall follow me to the nearest tavern. (Rises.) By the great gods of eating, Guido, I am as hungry as a widow is for a husband, as tired as a young maid is of good advice, and as dry as a monk’s sermon. Come, Guido, you stand there looking at nothing, like the fool who tried to look into his own mind; your man will not come.

GUIDO: Well, I suppose you are right. Ah! (Just as he is leaving the stage with ASCANIO, enter LORD MORANZONE in a violet cloak, with a silver falcon broidered on the shoulder; he passes across to the Cathedral, and just as he is going in GUIDO runs up and touches him.)

MORANZONE: Guido Ferranti, thou hast come in time.

GUIDO: What! Does my father live?