medicine. His strength was the chief of his few possessions, he thought,
and it would be better to spend a franc at the chemist's than to let it
be endangered. It was a serious matter. Suppose that the young lady,
instead of speaking to him about a boat, had told him to pick up the box
on which he was sitting--one of those big boxes these foreigners travel
with--and to carry it upstairs, he would have cut a poor figure just at
that moment, when his heart was thumping like a flat-fish in the bottom
of a boat, and his hands were trembling with cold. If it chanced again,
he would certainly go to Don Ciccio the chemist and buy a dose of
something with a strong bad taste, the stronger and the worse flavoured
the better, of course, as everyone knew. Very alarming, these symptoms!

Then he fell to thinking of the young lady herself, and she seemed to
rise before him, just as he had seen her a few moments earlier. The
signs of his new malady immediately grew worse again, and when it
somehow struck him that he might serve her, and let Sebastiano be
boatman to the Count, the pounding at his ribs became positively
terrifying, and he jumped up and began to walk about. Just then the door
opened suddenly and San Miniato put out his head.

"Are you the sailor who is to get me a boat?" he asked.

"Yes, Eccellenza," answered Ruggiero turning quickly, cap in hand.
Strange to say, at the sound of the man's voice the alarming symptoms
totally disappeared and Ruggiero was quite himself again.

He remembered also that he had been engaged for the Count, through the
people of the hotel, on condition of approval, and that it would be
contrary to boatman's honour to draw back. After all, too, women in a
boat were always a nuisance at the best, and he liked the Count's face,