me such a wrong; but by the body of God I will pay thee out." Pinuccio,
who was not the most discreet of gallants, albeit he was now apprised of
his error, instead of doing his best to repair it, retorted:--"And how
wilt thou pay me out? What canst thou do?" "Hark what high words our
guests are at together!" quoth meanwhile the host's wife to Adriano,
deeming that she spoke to her husband. "Let them be," replied Adriano
with a laugh:--"God give them a bad year: they drank too much yestereve."
The good woman had already half recognized her husband's angry tones, and
now that she heard Adriano's voice, she at once knew where she was and
with whom. Accordingly, being a discreet woman, she started up, and
saying never a word, took her child's cradle, and, though there was not a
ray of light in the room, bore it, divining rather than feeling her way,
to the side of the bed in which her daughter slept; and then, as if
aroused by the noise made by her husband, she called him, and asked what
he and Pinuccio were bandying words about. "Hearest thou not," replied
the husband, "what he says he has this very night done to Niccolosa?"
"Tush! he lies in the throat," returned the good woman: "he has not lain
with Niccolosa; for what time he might have done so, I laid me beside her
myself, and I have been wide awake ever since; and thou art a fool to
believe him. You men take so many cups before going to bed that then you
dream, and walk in your sleep, and imagine wonders. 'Tis a great pity you
do not break your necks. What does Pinuccio there? Why keeps he not in
his own bed?"

Whereupon Adriano, in his turn, seeing how adroitly the good woman
cloaked her own and her daughter's shame:--"Pinuccio," quoth he, "I have
told thee a hundred times, that thou shouldst not walk about at night;
for this thy bad habit of getting up in thy dreams and relating thy
dreams for truth will get thee into a scrape some time or another: come
back, and God send thee a bad night." Hearing Adriano thus confirm what