October can be cold enough sometimes in the Val d’Arno when the snow falls on the Apennines, and the woods of Vallombrosa are sere, and Florence, the flower city, lies then at the mercy of the winds. Mamie Whittaker, who, in her own phrase, “hated to be blown about anyhow,” had not been out all day. She lolled in an armchair before a crackling fire of olive wood in the room that she “lit with herself when alone,” though scarcely in the Tennysonian sense. Hers was a vivid personality, and older women who disliked her called her flamboyant, and referred to an evident touch of the tar-brush that would make her socially impossible in America though it passed unnoticed in Italy. Her age was seventeen, and she dressed after Carmen to please herself, and read Gyp with the same intention. She was absorbed now in Les Amoureux, and had to be told twice that her cousin had come before she would look up.

“Miss Marvel? Show her in.”

She rose and went forward to greet her relative, whom she had not seen for some years, and the two met at the door and kissed each other with enthusiasm.

“Edna! My! Well, you have not grown anyway. What a tiny thing! Come and sit down right here.” She rang for tea while her visitor slowly and rather shyly divested herself of her sables and laid them on a side table. Edna Marvel was the elder of the two by three years, but she was so small that she seemed a mere child. Her sallow little face resembled that of a tired monkey, yet it had an elfin charm, and her hands were beautiful as carved toys of ivory made in the East for a king’s son to play with. They might hold a man’s heart perhaps, but Mamie did not notice them, her own allurements being of more obvious description.

She thought Edna was real homely, and her spirits rose accordingly. “Where are you staying?”

“At the Bristol. Poppa guessed we would take a villa later on if we felt like it.”

Mamie rang again. “Bring some more cakes, and tell Miss Agar to come and pour out the tea.”

“Who is Miss Agar?”

“My companion, a sort of governess person. She takes me out walks, and sits by when my music-master comes, and so forth. She is new, and she won’t do, but I may as well make her useful while she stays.” “Why won’t she do?”

“Oh, she just won’t. Momma don’t like her much, and I’m not singing her praises.”

Edna looked curiously at the slender girl in the black dress who came in and took her place at the table.

She said “Good afternoon” in her pleasant little voice.

The governess person seemed rather surprised that she should address her.

“Good afternoon,” she replied. “Do you take milk and sugar?”

“Bring them round for us to help ourselves,” dictated Mamie.

Olive only smiled as she repeated her question, but Edna was distressed at her cousin’s rudeness, and her sensitive face was quite pink as she hurriedly declined sugar. She came to the table to fetch her cup, but Miss Whittaker waited for hers to be brought to her.

“How do you like this room, Edna? I had it fixed up for myself, and everything in it is mine.” She looked complacently up at the hangings of primrose silk that hid the fifteenth century frescoes on the walls.

Her cousin hesitated. “I guess it must have cost some.”

“Yes. The Marchese does not like it. He is so set on his worm-eaten old tapestries and carved chairs, and he wanted momma to refurnish the palace to match, but not she! Louis Quinze, she said, and Louis Quinze it is, more or less. I tell the Marchese that if he is so fond of the musty Middle Ages he ought to go about in armour himself by rights. But the old sinner is not really a bit romantic.”

It occurred to Olive that the right kind of governess would utter a word in season. “It is not usual for young girls to refer to their stepfathers as you do,” she said drily.

“Wait until you know mine better,” Mamie answered unabashed. “Last night he said your complexion was miraculous. Next thing he’ll try if it comes off. Are you coming to dinner to-night, Edna?”

“Yes, auntie asked us. The—the Prince will be here, won’t he?”

Mamie looked down her nose. “Oh, yes,” she said carelessly. “Your beau will come. People generally do when we ask them. The food is all right, and we have real good music afterwards sometimes. You know Avenel stays in Florence whiles because his brother has a Villa at Settignano. Well, momma guessed she would get him to play here for nothing once. Of course she was willing to pay any money for him really, but she just thought she would try it on. She asked him to dinner with a lot of other people, and made him take her in, though there were two Neapolitan dukes among the guests. The food was first-rate; she had told the cook to do his best, and she really thought the entrÉe would have made Vitellius sit up. It was perfect. Well, afterwards she asked Avenel to play, and he just smiled and said he could not. Why, she said, he gave a recital the day before for nothing, for a charity, and played the people’s souls out of their bodies, made them act crazy, as he always does. Couldn’t he play for friendship? No, he said, he couldn’t just then because one must be filled with sorrow oneself before one can make others feel, and he inferred that he had no room even for regret. ‘I play Chopin on a biscuit,’ he said.”

“He must be rather a pig,” was Edna’s comment.

“Not a bit of it. Momma said he really had not eaten much; in fact she had noticed that he left a bit of that lovely entrÉe. Perhaps he is afraid of getting fat. Momma was real mad with him.”

Olive’s cheeks were flushed and her hands trembled as she arranged the cups on the tray. She was thankful for the shelter afforded by the great silver tea-pot. Mamie’s back was turned to her, but Edna seemed desirous of including her in the conversation.

“Have you heard Avenel, Miss Agar?” she asked presently in her gentle, drawling way.

“No. Is he very famous? I have never heard of him as a pianist.”

“Oh, his professional name is Meryon, of course. He is billed as that and known all the world over, though he only began to play in public three years ago when his wife left him. She was always a horrid woman, and she made him marry her when he was quite a boy, they say. They say he plays to forget things as other men take to drink. He has been twice to New York, and I know a girl who says he gave her a lock of his hair, but I don’t believe her. It is dark brown, almost black, but I guess she cut it off a switch. He’s not that kind.”

Olive said nothing.

“You need not stay if you don’t want to,” Mamie said unceremoniously. “Be ready to come down after dinner. I might want you to play my accompaniments.”

“I can’t think why you say she won’t do,” cried Edna when she was gone out of the room. “I call her perfectly sweet. Rather sad-looking, but just lovely.”

Mamie sniffed. “Glad you admire her,” she said.

The governess was expected to appear at luncheon, but dinner was served to her in her own room, where she must sit in solitary state, dressed in her best and waiting for a summons, until eleven o’clock, when she might assume that she would not be wanted and go to bed. This evening Olive lingered rather anxiously over her dressing, trying to make the best of herself, since it seemed that she was really to come down to-night into the yellow drawing-room where she spent so many weary hours of a morning listening to Mamie scraping her Strad while the German who was supposed to teach her possessed his soul in patience. She put on her black silk dress. It was a guinea robe bought at a sale in Oxford Street the year before, a reach-me-down garment for women to sneer at and men to describe vaguely as something dark, and she hated the poor thing.

Most women believe that the men who like them in cotton frocks would adore them in cloth of gold, and are convinced that the secret of Cleopatra’s charm lay in her extensive wardrobe.

Avenel. It had shocked Olive to hear his name uttered by alien lips, as it hurt her to suppose that he came often to the Palazzo Lorenzoni. She would not suppose it, and, indeed, nothing that Mamie had said could lead her to think that he was a friend of the family. They had clutched at him greedily, and he had repaid with an impertinence. That was all.

The third footman, whose duty it was to attend upon her, brought two covered dishes on a tray at eight o’clock, and soon after nine he came again to fetch her.

There was a superabundance of gorgeous lackeys in the corridors that had been dusty and deserted five years before, and a gigantic Suisse stood always on guard now outside the palace gates. The Marchesa would have liked to have had outriders in her scarlet livery when she went out driving in the streets of Florence, but her husband warned her that some mad anarchist might take her for the Queen, and so she contented herself with a red racing motor. The millions old Whittaker had made availed to keep his widow and the man who had given her a title in almost regal state. They entertained largely, and the Via Tornabuoni was often blocked with the carriages and motors that brought their guests. Olive, sitting alone in her chilly bedroom, mending her stockings or trying to read, heard voices and laughter as the doors opened—harsh Florentine and high English voices, and the shrill sounds of American mirth—night after night. But the Lorenzoni dined en famille sometimes, as even marquises and millionaires may do, and there were but two shirt-fronts and comparatively few diamonds in the great golden shining room when she entered it.

The Marchesa, handsome, hard-featured, gorgeous in grey and silver, did not choose to notice her daughter’s governess; she was deep in talk with her brother-in-law; but men could not help looking at Olive. Mr Marvel stood up and bowed as she passed, and the silent, saturnine Marchese stared. His black eyes were intent upon her as she came to the piano where Mamie was restlessly turning over the music, and no one watching him could fail to see that he was making comparisons that were probably to the disadvantage of his step-daughter.

Fast men are not necessarily fond of the patchouli atmosphere in their own homes, and somehow Mamie seemed to reek of that scent, though in fact she never used it. She was clever and fairly well educated, and she had always been sheltered and cared for, but she was born to the scarlet, and everything she said and did, her way of walking, the use she made already of her black eyes, proclaimed it. To-night, though she wore the red she loved—a wonderful, flaring frock of chiffon frills and flounces—she looked ill, and her dark face was sullen.

“The beastly wind has given me a stiff neck,” she complained. “Here, I want to have this.”

She chose a coon’s lullaby out of the pile of songs, and Olive sat down obediently and began the accompaniment. It was a pretty little ditty of the usual moony order, and Mamie sang it well enough. Mr Marvel looked up when it was over to say, “Thank you, my dear. Very nice.”

“It is a silly thing,” Mamie answered ungraciously. “I’ll sing you a canzonetta now.”

She turned over the music, scattering marches and sonatas, and throwing some of them on the floor in her impatience. Olive, wondering at her temper, presently divined the cause of it. The folding doors that led into the library were half closed. No lamps, but a flicker of firelight and the hush of lowered voices, Edna’s pleasant little pipe and a man’s brief, murmured answers, and there were short spaces of silence too. The American girl and her prince were there.

The Marchese had raised his eyebrows at the first words of the canzonetta, and at the end of the second verse he was smiling broadly.

“Little devil!” he said.

No one heard him. His wife was showing her brother-in-law some of her most treasured bits of china. She was quite calm, as though her knowledge of Italian was fair the Neapolitan dialect was beyond her. Mr Marvel, of course, knew not a syllable of any language but his own, and the slang of Southern gutters was as Greek to Olive. Their placidity amused the Marchese, and so did the thought of the little scene that he knew was being enacted in the library.

“Shall we join the others now, Edna, carissima?”

“If—if you like.”

He nearly laughed aloud as he saw the silk curtains drawn. The Prince stood aside to allow Edna to pass in first, and Olive, glancing up momentarily from the unfamiliar notes, saw the green gleam of an emerald on the strong brown hand as the brocaded folds were lifted up. Her own hands swerved, blundered, and she perpetrated a hopeless discord.

“I beg your pardon,” she said confusedly.

Mamie shrugged her shoulders. “Never mind,” she answered lightly. “The last verse don’t matter anyway. Come to here, Edna. Momma wants to hear your fiddle-playing.”

“Yes, play us something, my dear.”

The little girl came forward shyly.

As the Prince and the Marchese stood together by the fireplace at the other end of the long room Mamie joined them. “You sang that devil’s nocturne inimitably,” observed her stepfather, drily. “I am quite sorry to have to ask you not to do it again.”

“Not again? Why not?”

She perched herself on the arm of one of the great gilt chairs. The Prince raised his eyes from the thoughtful contemplation of her ankles to stare at her impudent red parted lips.

“Why not! Need I explain, cara? It was delicious; I enjoyed it, but, alas!” He heaved an exaggerated sigh and then laughed, and the young man and the girl shared in his merriment.

“I am sorry to make so many mistakes,” Olive said apologetically as she laboured away at her part of an easy piece arranged for violin and piano. “Oh, it is nothing. I have made ever so many myself, and I ought to have turned the page for you.”

The gentle voice was rather tremulous.

“That was charming,” pronounced the Marchesa. “Now that sonata, Edna. I am so fond of it.”

“Very well, auntie.”

The Prince had gone into the billiard-room with his host, and Mamie was with them. They were knocking the balls about and laughing ... laughing.

CHAPTER II

In the Cascine gardens the lush green grass of the glades was strewn with leaves; soon the branches would be bare, or veiled only in winter mists, and the Arno, swollen with rain, ran yellow as Tiber. It was not a day for music, but the sun shone, and many idle Florentines drove, or rode, or walked by the Lung’Arno to the Rajah’s monument, passing and repassing the bench where Olive sat with Madame de SariviÈre’s stout and elderly German FrÄulein. Mamie was not far away; flamboyant as ever in her frock of crimson serge, her black curls tied with ribbon and streaming in the wind, she was the loud centre of a group of girls who played some running game to an accompaniment of shrill cries and little screams of laughter.

“Do you like young girls?” Olive asked the question impulsively, after a long silence.

“I am fond of my pupils; they are good little things, rather foolish, but amiable. But I understand your feeling, my poor Miss Agar. Your charge is—”

Olive hesitated. “It is a difficult age; and she has the body of twenty and the sense of ten. I am putting it very badly, but—but I was hateful years ago too. I think one always is, perhaps. I remember at school there were self-righteous little girls; they were narrow and intolerant, easily shocked, and rather bad-tempered. The others were absurdly vain, sentimental, sly. All that comes away afterwards if one is going to be nice.”

“They are female but not yet womanly. The newly-awakened instincts clamour at first for a hearing; later they learn to wait in silence, to efface themselves, to die, even,” answered the FrÄulein, gravely.

A victoria passed, then some youths on bicycles, shouting to each other and ringing their bells. They were riding all together, but they scattered to let Prince Tor di Rocca go by. He was driving tandem, and his horses were very fresh. Edna was with him, her small wan face rather set in its halo of ashen blonde hair and pale against the rich brown of her sables.

When they came by the second time Mamie called to her cousin. The Prince drew rein, and the groom sprang down and ran to the leader’s head.

“My, Edna, how cold you look! It’s three days since I saw you, but I guess Don Filippo has been doing the honours. Have you seen all the old galleries and things? Momma said she noticed you and uncle in a box at the Pergola last night.”

She stood by the wheel, and as she looked up, not at Edna but at the Prince, he glanced smilingly down at her and then away again.

“We are going back to the hotel now,” Edna said. “Will you come and have tea, Mamie? Is that Miss Agar over there? Ask her if you may, and if she will come too.”

“I don’t need to ask her,” the girl answered, but she went back nevertheless and spoke to Olive.

“Can the groom take the cart home, Filippo? We will walk back with them.”

“Yes, Bellina is in spirits, but she will not run away from Giovanni,” he said, trying not to seem surprised that she should curtail their drive.

They crossed the wide gravelled space outside the gardens and walked towards the town by the Lung’Arno. Already the cypresses of San Miniato showed black against the sky, and the reflected flame of sunset was dying out in the windows of the old houses at the river’s edge. All the people were going one way now, and leaving the tree-shadowed dusk for the brightly-lit streets, Via Tornabuoni, all palaces and antiquity shops, and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the band would play presently.

The two American girls walked together with Don Filippo and Olive followed them. Edna held herself very erect, but Mamie seemed almost to lean backwards. She swayed her hips as she went and swung her short skirts, and there was affectation and a feverish self-consciousness in her every movement. Olive could not help smiling to herself, but she remembered that at school she had been afflicted with the idea that a pout—the delicious moue of fiction—became her, and so she was inclined to leniency. Only seventeen.

The Prince wore riding gloves, and so the green gleam of his emerald was hidden from her. If only she could be sure that she had seen him before. What then? Nothing—if she could think that he would always be kind to gentle little Edna.

Just before they reached the hotel Miss Marvel joined her, leaving her cousin to go on with Don Filippo, and began to talk to her.

“The river is just perfect at this hour. Our sitting-room has a balcony and I sat there last night watching the moon rise over San Miniato. I guess it looked just that way when Dante wrote his sonnets. Beatrice must have been real mad with him sometimes, don’t you think so? She must have been longing to say, ‘Come on, and don’t keep talking.’ But she was a nice high-minded girl, and so she never did. She simply died.”

“If she died for him she must have been a fool,” Olive said shortly. Her eyes were fixed on the Prince’s broad back. He was laughing at some sally of Mamie’s.

Edna was shocked. “Don’t you just worship Dante?”

“Yes, yes,” answered the elder girl. “He was a dear, but even he was not worth that. At least, I don’t know. He was a dear; but I was thinking of a girl I knew ... perhaps I may tell you about her some day.”

“Yes, do,” Edna said perfunctorily. She was trying to hear what her cousin was saying to Filippo, and wishing she could amuse him as well. They passed through the wide hall of the hotel and went up in the lift. The Marvels’ private sitting-room was on the second floor. They were much too rich to condescend to the palms and bamboo tables and wicker chairs of the common herd, and tea was served to Edna and her guests in a green and white boudoir that was, as the Marchesa might have said, more or less Louis Seize.

Mr Marvel came in presently, refusing tea, but asking leave to smoke, and the Prince, gracefully deferential to his future father-in-law, listened to the little he had to say, answering carefully in his perfect English.

“Yes, sir. There is a great deal of poverty here. On my Tuscan estates too. Alas! yes.” Mamie sat near him, and in the flickering red light of the fire she looked almost pretty. Filippo’s eyes strayed towards her now and then. Edna came presently to where Olive rested apart on the wide cushioned window-seat. “Will you have some more tea?”

“No, thank you. I think we must be going soon. The Marchesa will not like it if we stay out too long.”

Edna hesitated. “I wanted to ask you a silly question. Had you ever seen the Prince before last week?”

There was the slightest perceptible pause before Olive answered, “No, never. Why do you ask?”

“I thought you looked as if you had somehow that night at the Lorenzoni palace. When we came in you were at the piano, and I thought you looked queer—as if—”

“Oh, no,” Olive said again, but she wondered afterwards if she had done right.

On their way home Mamie drew her attention to a poster, and she saw the name of Meryon in great orange letters on a white ground.

“He will be here before Christmas. I’ll let you come with me to hear him play if you are good,” she said, and she took the elder girl’s hand in hers and pinched it. “I could race you home down this side street, but I suppose I must not.” She was gay and good-humoured now, and altogether at her best, and Olive tried hard to like her, but she could not help seeing that the triumph that overflowed in easy, shallow kindness was an unworthy one.

CHAPTER III

Olive sat alone at the end of one of the tiers of the stone amphitheatre built into the hill that rises, ilex clad, to the heights of San Giorgio. Some other women were there, mothers with young children, nurses and governesses dowdily dressed as she was in dark-coloured stuffs, but she knew none of them.

Mamie seldom cared to come to the old Boboli gardens. Its green mildewed terraces and crumbling deities of fountain and ilex grove had no charm for her, and as a rule she and her friends preferred the crowded Lung’Arno and Cascine on the days when there was music, but this Thursday she had suggested that they should come across the river.

“Daisy Vereker has promised to meet me, and as she is only here a week on her way to school in Paris I should hate to disappoint her.”

The two girls were lingering now about the grass arena, talking volubly, whispering, giggling. Miss Vereker’s maid, a yellow-haired Swiss, sat not far off with her knitting, and every now and then she called harshly to her charge to know the time. Olive sat very still, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the far horizon. She loved the old-world silence that was only broken by the dripping of water in the pools. No birds sang here, no leaves fell at the waning of the year. The seasons had little power over stained marble and moss, cypress, and ilex and olive, and as spring brought no riot of green and rose and gold in flower, so autumn took nothing away. Surely there were ghosts in the shadowed avenues, flitting in and out among the trees, joining hands to dance “la ronde” about the pool of Neptune. Gay abbÉs, cavaliers, beautiful ladies of the late Renaissance, red-heeled, painted, powdered; frail, degenerate children of the hard-headed old Florentine citizens pictured in the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. No greater shades could come to Boboli.

Florence was half hidden by the great yellow bulk of the Pitti palace, but Olive could see the slender, exquisite white and rose tower of Giotto, and the mellowed red of the cathedral’s dome against the faint purple of the hills beyond Fiesole, and she looked at them in preference to the contorted river gods and exuberant nymphs of the fountain in the royal courtyard close by.

After a while she opened her book and began to read. Presently she shivered; her jacket was thin, and the air grew chilly as the afternoon waned, but her reading absorbed her and she was surprised, when at last she raised her eyes, to see that the Pitti palace was already dark against the sky. Nurses and children were making their way out, and soon those who lingered would hear stentorian shouts from the gardeners, “Ora si chiude!” and they too would leave by one or other of the gates.

Olive climbed down into the arena. Mamie was nowhere in sight, and Daisy Vereker and her maid were gone too. Olive, thinking that perhaps they might have gone up to the fountain of Neptune, began to climb the hill. She asked an old man who was coming down from there if he had seen two young ladies, one dressed in red.

“No, signorina.”

She hurried back to the arena and spoke to a woman there. “Have you seen a young lady in red with black curls?”

She answered readily: “Sicuro! She went towards the Porta Romana half an hour ago. I think the other signorina was leaving and she wished to accompany her a part of the way. There was an older person with them.”

Olive’s relief was only momentary; it sounded well, but one might walk to the Porta Romana and back twice in the time. Soon the gates would be closed, and if she had not found Mamie then, and the gardeners made her leave with the others, what should she do? She suspected a trick. The girl had a mischievous and impish humour that delighted in the infliction of small hurts, and she might have gone home, happy in the thought that her governess would get a “wigging,” or she might be hiding about somewhere to give her a fright.

Olive went up the steep path towards the Belvedere, hoping to find her there. That part of the garden was not much frequented, and the white bodies and uplifted arms of the marble gods gleamed ghostly and forlorn in the dusk of the ilex woods that lay between the amphitheatre and the gate.

She went on until she saw a glimmer of red through the close-woven branches. Mamie was there in the dark wood, and she was not alone. A man was with her, and he was holding her easily, as if he knew she would not go yet, and laughing as she stood on tiptoe to reach the fine cruel lips that touched hers presently, when he chose that they should.

Olive turned and ran up the path to the top of the hill, and there she stood for a while, trying to get her breath, trying to be calm, and sane and tolerant, to see no harm where perhaps there was none after all. And yet the treachery and the deceit were so flagrant that surely no condonation was possible. She felt sick of men and women, and of life itself, since the greatest thing in it seemed to be this hateful, miscalled love that preceded sorrow and shame and death. Was love always loathsome to look upon? Not in pictures or on the stage, where it was represented as a kind of minuet in which the man makes graceful advances to a woman who smiles as she draws away, but in real life—

“Not real love,” she said to herself. “Oh, God, help me to go on believing in that.”

Raising her eyes she saw the evening star sparkling in a wide, soft, clear space of sky. It seemed infinitely pure and remote, and yet somehow good and kind, as it had to Dante when he climbed up out of hell.

“Quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.”

“Ora si chiude!” bawled a gardener from the Belvedere.

Mamie came hurrying up the path towards the hill. “Oh, are you there?” she said in some confusion. “I went some of the way to the other gate with Daisy.”

“I was beginning to be afraid you were lost, so I came along hoping to meet you,” answered Olive.

She said nothing to the girl of what she had seen. It would have been useless; nothing could alter or abash her inherent unmorality. But after dinner she wrote a note to Edna and went out herself to post it. The answer came at noon on the following day. Miss Marvel would be at home and alone between three and four and would be pleased to see Miss Agar then; meanwhile she remained very sincerely her friend.

CHAPTER IV

“Why do you tell me this now?” asked Edna. “The other day when I asked you if you had known him before you said you had not.”

“Something that has happened since then determined me.”

Edna’s room was full of flowers, roses, narcissi and violets, and the air was heavy with their scent. Filippo had never failed in his petits soins. It was so easy to give an order at the florist’s, and the bill would come in presently, after the wedding, and be paid in American dollars. There were boxes of sweets too; and a volume of Romola, bound in white and gold, lay on the table. Edna had been looking at the inscription on the fly-leaf when Olive came in. “Carissima” he had written, and she had believed him, but that was half an hour ago. Now her small body was shaken with sobs, her face was stained with tears because that faith she had had was dying.

The chill at her heart made her feel altogether cold, and she edged her chair nearer to the fire, and put her feet up on the fender.

“I wish I could feel it was not true, but somehow though I have been so fond of him I have not trusted him. Well, your cousin was beautiful, and perhaps he had known her a long time before he knew me. He wanted to say good-bye kindly. He was entangled—such things happen, I know. He could not help what happened afterwards. That was not his fault.”

Olive could not meet her pleading eyes. “I thought something like that last week,” she said. “And that is why I kept silence; but now I know he would make you unhappy always. Oh, forgive me for hurting you so.” She came and knelt down beside the little girl, and put her arms about her. “Don’t cry, my dear. Don’t cry.”

“Oh, Olive, I was so fond of him! Now tell me what has happened since.”

“Put your hands in mine. There, I will rub the poor tiny things and warm them. They are so pretty. Yesterday, in the Boboli gardens, I missed your cousin, and when I went to look for her I saw her with the Prince. He held her and was kissing her.”

“Oh!” Edna sprang to her feet. “That settles it. Mamie is common and real homely, and if he can run after her I have done with him. I could have forgiven the other, especially as she is dead, but Mamie! Gracious! Here he is!”

He came into the room leisurely, smiling, very sure of his welcome. Olive met the hot insolence of his stare steadily, and Edna turned her back on him. “Olive,” she said, “you speak to him. Tell him—ask him—” Her gentle voice broke.

“What is the matter?” he asked carefully.

“I saw you twice in Siena last summer. Do you remember Rigoletto at the Lizza theatre? You were in the stage box. You wore evening dress, and I saw that emerald ring you have now on your finger. The next day you met my Cousin Gemma in my room in the Vicolo dei Moribondi. Do you remember the steep dark stairs and the white walls of the bare place where you saw her last?”

He made no answer, and there was still a smile on his lips, but his eyes were hard. Edna was looking at him now, but he seemed to have forgotten her.

“I suppose you loved her,” Olive said slowly. “Do you remember the faint pink curve of her mouth, the little cleft in her chin, and her hair that was so soft and fine? There were always little stray curls on the white nape of her neck. I came to my room that morning to fetch a book. When I had climbed the stairs I found that I had not the key with me, but the door was unlocked and I saw her there with a man, and I saw the green gleam of an emerald.”

Men have such a power of silence. No woman but would have made some answer now, denying with a show of surprise, making excuses, using words in one way or another. “They were talking about you in the town, though I think they did not know who you were—at least I never heard your name—and that night Gemma’s fidanzato told her he would not marry her. You know best what that meant to her. She rushed into her own room and threw herself out of the window. Ah, you should have seen the dark blood oozing through the fine soft curls! She lay dead in the street for hours before they took her away.”

“Santissimo Dio! Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“Gemma—I never knew it—” His face was greatly altered now, and he had to moisten his lips before he could speak.

“I could have forgiven that,” Edna said tremulously after a while. “But not yesterday. Your kisses are too cheap, Filippo.”

“Oh,” he said hoarsely. “So Gemma’s cousin saw that too. It was nothing, meant nothing. Edna, if you can pardon the other, surely—”

“It was nothing; and it proved that Mamie is nothing, and that you are nothing—to me. That is the end of the matter.”

He winced now at the contempt underlying her quiet words, and when she took off her ring and laid it on the table between them he picked it up and flung it into the fire.

“I do not take things back,” he said savagely. When he had left the room Edna began to cry again. “I believe he is suffering now, but not for me. Would he care if I killed myself? I guess not. I am not pretty, only my hands, and hands don’t count.”

Olive tried to comfort her.

“Poppa shall take me away right now. I have had enough of Europe, and so I shall tell him when he comes in. Must you go now? Well, good-bye, my dear, and thank you. You are white all through, and I am glad you have acted as you have, though it hurts now. If ever I marry it shall be an American ... but I was real fond of Filippo.”

CHAPTER V

Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal was buried in a side chapel of the church of San Miniato al Monte, and his counterfeit presentment, wrought in stone, lies on the tomb Rossellino made for him. Rossellino, who loved to carve garlands of acanthus and small sweet amorini, has conferred immortality on some of the men whose tombs he adorned in basso-riliÈvo, and they are remembered because of him; but the cardinal has another claim. He is beautiful in himself as he rests there, his young face set in the peace that passes all understanding, his thin hands folded on his breast.

Mourners were kneeling in the central aisles of the church, and women carrying wreaths passed through it on their way to the Campo Santo beyond, for this was the day of All Souls, and there were fresh flowers on the new graves, and little black lamps were lit on those that were grass grown and decked only with the bead blossoms that are kept in glass cases and need not be changed once a year. The afternoon was passing, but still Olive lingered by the cardinal’s monument. Looking at him understandingly she saw that there had been lines of pain about the firm mouth. He had suffered in his short life, he had suffered until death came to comfort him and give him quiet sleep. The mother-sense in her yearned over him, lying there straight and still, with closed eyes that had never seen love; and, womanlike, she pitied the accomplished loneliness that yet seemed to her the most beautiful thing in the world. The old familiar words were in her mind as she looked down upon this saint uncanonised: “Cleanse the thoughts of my heart by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit!” and she remembered Astorre, for whose sake she had come to this church to pray. Once when she had been describing a haggard St Francis in the Sienese gallery to him, he had said: “Ah, women always pity him and admire his picturesque asceticism, but if married men look worried they do not notice it. Their troubles are no compliment to your sex.”

Poor Astorre had not been devout in any sense, but he had written his friend a long letter on the day after Gemma’s suicide, and he had asked for her prayers then. “Fausto told me how you knelt there in the street beside the dead Odalisque and said the Pater-noster and the Miserere. Perhaps you will do as much for me one day. Your prayers should help the soul that is freed now from the burden of the flesh. I cannot complain of flesh myself, but my bones weigh and I shall be glad to be rid of them. Come and see me soon, carissima ...”

The next morning his mother sent for the girl, but when she came into the darkened room where he lay he had already passed away.

“He asked for you, but he would not see a priest. You know they refused to bury his father because he fought for united Italy. Ah! Rome never forgets.”

After the funeral Signora Aurelia had sold her furniture and gone away, and she was living now with a widowed sister in Rome. The Menotti had left Siena too and had gone to Milan, and Olive, not caring to stay on alone in the place where everyone knew what had happened, had come to the Lorenzoni in Florence. She had had a letter from Carmela that morning.

“We like Milan as the streets are so gay, and the shops are beautiful. We should have got much better mourning here at Bocconi’s if we could have waited, but of course that was impossible. Our apartment is convenient, but small and rather dark. Maria hopes you are fatter. She is going to send you some panforte and a box of sugared fruits at Christmas. La Zia has begun to crochet another counterpane; that will be the eighth, and we have only three beds. Pazienza! It amuses her.”

Though Olive was not happy at the Palazzo Lorenzoni, she could not wish that she had stayed with her cousins. She felt that their little life would have stifled her. Thinking of them, she saw them, happier than before, since poor Gemma had not been easy to live with, and quite satisfied to do the same things every day, waddling out of a morning to early mass and the marketing, eating and sleeping during the noon hours, and in the evenings going to hear the music in piazza.

Olive was not happy. She was one of those women whose health depends upon their spirits, and of late she had felt her loneliness to be almost unbearable. Her youth had cried for all, or nothing. She would have her love winged and crowned; he should come to her before all the world. Never would she set her foot in secret gardens, or let joy come to her by hidden ways, but now she faced the future and saw that it was grey, and she was afraid.

It seemed to her that she was destined to live always in the Social Limbo, suspended between heaven and earth, an alien in the drawing-room and not received in the kitchen. One might as well be dÉclassÉe at once, she thought, and yet she knew that that must be hell.

If Avenel came to Florence and sought her out would she be weak as Gemma had been, light as Mamie was? Olive knelt for a while on the stones, and her lips moved, though her prayer was inarticulate. Sunset was burning across the Val d’Arno, and the river flowed as a stream of pure gold under the dark of the historic bridges. Already lights sparkled in the windows of the old houses over the Ponte Vecchio, and the bells of all the churches were ringing the Ave Maria as she passed through the whining crowd of beggars at the gate of the Campo Santo and went slowly down the hill. The blessed hour of peace and silence was over now, and she must trudge back through the clamorous streets to be with Mamie, to meet the Marchese’s horribly observant eyes, and to be everlastingly quiet and complacent and useful. She was paid for that.

She was going up to her room when the lodge porter ran up the stairs after her with a letter. “For you, signorina.”

It was from Edna.

One of the servants came to Olive’s room presently. “La Signora Marchesa wishes to see you at once in her boudoir.”

The Marchesa had come straight from the motor to her own room, her head was still swathed in a white veil, and she had not even taken off her heavy sable coat. She had switched on the light on her entrance, and now she was searching in the drawers of her bureau for her cheque-book.

“Ah, well, gold perhaps,” she said after a while, impatiently, as she snapped open the chain purse that hung from her wrist. “Is that you, Miss Agar?”

Olive, seeing her counting out her money, like the queen in the nursery rhyme, had stopped short near the door. She paled a little as she understood this must be the sequel to what she had done, but she held her head high, and there was a light of defiance in the blue eyes.

“I have to speak to you very seriously.”

The Marchesa, a large woman, was slow and deliberate in all her movements. She took her place on a brocaded settee with the air of a statue of Juno choosing a pedestal, and began to draw off her gloves. “I greatly regret that this should be necessary.” She seemed prepared to clean Augean stables, and there was something judicial in her aspect too, but she did not look at Olive. “You know that I took you into my house on the recommendation of the music-teacher, Signora Giannini. It was foolish, I see that now. It has come to my knowledge that you had no right to enter here, no right to be with my daughter.” She paused. “You must understand perfectly what I mean,” she said impressively.

“No, I do not understand,” the girl said. “Will you explain, Marchesa?”

“Can you deny that you were involved in a most discreditable affair in Siena before you came here? That your intrigue—I hate to have to enter into the unsavoury details, Miss Agar, but you have forced me to it—that your intrigue with your cousin’s fiancÉ drove her to suicide, and that you were obliged to leave the place in consequence?”

“It is not true.”

“Ah, but your cousin killed herself?”

“Yes.”

“Her lover was in the house at the time, and you were there too?”

“Yes.”

“You were at the theatre the night before and everyone noticed that he paid you great attention?”

“He? Oh,” cried Olive, “how horrible, and how clever!”

The hard grey eyes met hers for a moment.

The girl’s pale face was flushed now with shame and anger. “So clever! Will you congratulate the Prince for me, Marchesa?” she said very distinctly. “You are impertinent. Of course, I cannot keep you. My daughter—”

The Marchesa saw her mistake as she made it and would have passed on, but Olive was too quick for her. She smiled. “Your daughter! I do not think I can have harmed her.”

“You can take your money; I have left it there for you on the bureau. Please pack your boxes and be off as soon as possible.”

“I am to leave to-night? It is dark already, and I have no friends in Florence.”

The Marchesa shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t help that,” she said.

Olive went slowly out into the hall, and stood there hesitating at the head of the stairs. She scarcely knew what to do or where to turn, but she was determined not to stay longer than she could help under this roof. She went down to the porter’s lodge in the paved middle court.

“Gigia!”

The old woman came hobbling out to greet her with a toothless smile. “Ah, bella signorina, there are no more letters for you to-night. Have you come to talk to me for a little?”

“I am going away,” the girl answered hurriedly. “Will your husband come in to fetch my luggage soon? At eight o’clock?”

Gigia laid a skinny hand on Olive’s arm, and her sharp old eyes blinked anxiously as she said, “Where are you going, nina mia?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not to the Prince?”

“Good heavens! No!”

“Ah, the padrona is hard—and you are pretty. I thought it might be that, perhaps. Don Filippo is like his old wolf of a father, and young lambs should beware of him.”

“Can you tell me of some quiet, decent rooms where I can go to night?”

“Sicuro! My husband’s brother keeps the Aquila Verde, and you can go there. Giovanni will give you his best room if he hears that you come from us, and he will not charge too much. I am sorry you are going, cara.”

Olive squeezed her hand. “Thank you, Gigia. You are the only one I am sorry to say good-bye to. I shall not forget you.”

The Marchese was coming down the stairs as Olive went up again. He smiled at her as he stood aside to let her pass. “You are late, are you not? I shall not tell tales but I hope for your sake that my wife won’t see you.”

“She won’t see me again. I am going,” she answered.

He would have detained her. “One moment,” he said eagerly, but she was not listening. “I shall miss you.” After all she heard him. “Thank you,” she said gravely.

A door was closed on the landing below, and the master of the house glanced at it apprehensively. He was not sure—

CHAPTER VI

The Aquila Verde was the oldest of the tall houses in the narrow Vicolo dei Donati; the lower windows were barred with iron worn by the rains of four hundred years, and there were carved marble pillars on either side of the door. The faÇade had been frescoed once, and some flakes of colour, red, green and yellow, still adhered to the wall close under the deep protecting eaves.

“It was a palace of the Donati once,” the host explained to Olive as he set a plate of steaming macaroni swamped in tomato sauce before her.

“I thought it might have been a convent, because of the long paved corridors and this great room that is like a refectory.”

“No, the Donati lived here. Dante’s wife, Gemma, perhaps. Who knows!”

Ser Giovanni took up a glass and polished it vigorously with the napkin he carried always over his arm before he filled it with red Chianti. He had never had a foreigner in his house before, but he had heard many tales about them from the waiters in the great Anglo-American hotels on the Lung’Arno, and he knew that they craved for warmth and an unlimited supply of hot water and tea. Naturally he was afraid of them, and he was also shy of stray women, but Olive was pretty, and he was a man, and moreover a Florentine, and his brother had come with her and had been earnest in his recommendations, so he was anxious to please her. “There is no dolce to-night,” he said apologetically. “But perhaps you will take an orange.”

When Olive went up to her room presently she found a great copper jar of hot water set beside the tiny washstand. The barred window was high in the thickness of the stone wall and the uncarpeted floor was of brick. The place was bare and cold as a cell, but the bed, narrow and white as that of Mary Mother in Rossetti’s picture, invited her, and she slept well. She was awakened at eight o’clock by a young waiter who brought in her coffee and rolls on a tray. She was a little startled by his unceremonious entrance, but it seemed to be so much a matter of course that she could not resent it. He took the copper jar away with him. “The padrone says you will want some more water,” he said smilingly.

“Yes. But—but if you bring it back you can leave it outside the door.”

The coffee was not good, but it was hot, and the rolls were crisp and delicious, and Olive ate and drank happily and with an excellent appetite. No more listening to mangled scales and murdered nocturnes and sonatas, no more interminable meals at which she must sit silent and yet avoid “glumness,” no more walking at Mamie’s heels.

She was free!

Presently she said to herself, more soberly, that nevertheless she must work somehow to gain her livelihood. Yes, she must find work soon. The Aquila Verde would shelter and feed her for six lire a day. Her last month’s salary of eighty lire had been paid her four days ago, and she had already spent more than half of it on things she needed, new boots, an umbrella, gloves, odds and ends. This month’s money had been given her last night, and she had left a few lire for the servant who had always brought up her dinner to her room, and had made Gigia a little present. The cabman had bullied her into giving him two lire. She had about one hundred remaining to her. Sixes into one hundred.... Working it out carefully on the back of an old envelope she found that she might live on her means for sixteen days, and then go out into the streets with four lire in her pocket—no, three, since she could scarcely leave without giving a mancia to the young man whom she now heard whistling “Lucia” in the corridor.

“The hot water, signorina.”

“A thousand thanks.”

Surely in a few days she would find work. It occurred to her that she might advertise. “Young English lady would give lessons. Terms moderate. Apply O. A., Aquila Verde.” She wrote it out presently, and took it herself to the office of one of the local papers.

“I have saved fifteen centesimi,” she thought as she walked rather wearily back by the long Via Cavour.

Three days passed and she was the poorer by eighteen lire. On Sunday she spent the morning at the Belle Arti Gallery. Haggard saints peered out at her from dark corners. Flora smiled wistfully through her tears; she saw the three strong archangels leading boy Tobias home across the hills, and Angelico’s monks and nuns meeting the Blessed Ones in the green, daisied fields of Paradise, and for a little while she was able to forget that no one seemed to want English lessons.

On Monday she decided that she must leave the Aquila Verde if she could find anyone to take her for four, or even three lire a day. She went to Cook’s office in the Via Tornabuoni; it was crowded with Americans come for their mails, and she had to wait ten minutes before one of the young men behind the counter could attend to her.

“What can I do for you?”

“Can you recommend me to a very cheap pension?”

She noticed a faint alteration in his manner, as though he had lost interest in what she was saying, but when he had looked at her again he answered pleasantly, “There is Vinella’s in the Piazza Indipendenza, six francs, and there is another in the Via dei Bardi, I think; but I will ask. Excuse me.”

He went to speak to another clerk at the cashier’s desk. They both stared across at her, and she fancied she heard the words, pretty, cheap enough, poor.

“There is a place in the Via Decima kept by a Frau Heylmann. I think it might suit you, and I will write the address down. It is really not bad and I can recommend it as I am staying there myself,” he added ingenuously. He seemed really anxious to help now, and Olive thanked him.

As she went out she met Prince Tor di Rocca coming in. Their eyes met momentarily and he bowed. It seemed strange to her afterwards when she thought of it, but she fancied he would have spoken if she had given him an opportunity. Did he want to explain, to tell more lies? She had thought him too strong to care what women thought of him once they had served him and been cast aside. True, she was not precisely one of these.

The Via Decima proved to be one of the wide new streets near the Porta San Gallo. No. 38 was a pretentious house, a tenement building trying to look like a palace, and it was plastered over with dingy yellow stucco. Olive went through the hall into a courtyard hung with drying linen, and climbed up an outside iron staircase to the fifth floor. There was a brass plate on the Frau’s door, and Canova’s Graces in terra cotta smirked in niches on either side. The large pale woman who answered the bell wore a grey flannel dressing-gown that was almost buttonless, and her light hair was screwed into an absurdly small knot on the nape of her neck.

“You want to be taken en pension? Come in.”

She led the way into a bare and chilly dining-room; the long table was covered with black American cloth that reminded Olive of beetles, but everything was excessively clean. There was a framed photograph of the Kaiser on the sideboard. In a room beyond someone was playing the violin.

“How many are you in family?”

“I am alone.”

The Frau looked down at the gloved hands. “You are not married?”

“No.”

The woman hesitated. “You would be out during the day?”

“Oh, yes,” Olive said hopefully. “I shall be giving lessons.”

“Ah, well, perhaps—What would you pay?”

“I am poor, and I thought you would say as little as possible. I should be glad to help you in the house.”

“There is a good deal of mending,” the Frau said thoughtfully; “and you might clean your own room. Shall we say twenty-four lire weekly?”

The playing in the other room ceased, and a young man put his head in at the door. “Mutter,” he said, and then begged her pardon, but he did not go away.

Olive tried not to look at him, but he was staring at her and his eyes were extraordinarily blue. He was pale, and his wide brows and strong cleft chin reminded her of Botticelli’s steel-clad archangel. He wore his smooth fair hair rather long too, in the archangelic manner, he—

“Paid in advance,” Frau Heylmann said very sharply. Then she turned upon her son. “What do you want, Wilhelm?”

“Oh, I can wait,” he said easily.

She snorted. “I am sorry I cannot receive you,” she said to the girl. “I am not accustomed to have young women in my house. No.”

She waddled to the door and Olive followed her meekly, but she could not keep her lips from smiling. “I do not blame you,” she said as she passed out on to the landing. “Your son is charming.”

The woman looked at her more kindly now that she was going. “He is beautiful,” she said, with pride. “Some day he will be great. Ach! You should hear him play!”

Olive laughed. “You would not let me.”

She could not take this rebuff seriously, but as she trudged the streets in the thin cold rain that had fallen persistently all that morning her sense of humour was blunted by discomfort. The long dark, stone-paved hall that was the restaurant of the Aquila Verde seemed cold and cheerless. At noon it was always full of hungry men devouring macaroni and vitello alla Milanese, and the steam of hot food and the sound of masticating jaws greeted Olive as she came in and took her place at a little table near the stove.

The young waiter, Angelo, brought her a cup of coffee after the cheese and celery. “It gives courage,” he said. “And I see you need that to-day, signorina.”

CHAPTER VII

Olive saw the padrone of the Aquila Verde that night before she went to her room and told him she was leaving.

His face fell. “Signorina! I am sorry! I told Angelo to bring hot water every time, always, when you rang. Have you not been well served?”

She reassured him on that point and went on to explain that she was going to live alone. “I have made arrangements,” she added vaguely. “A man will come with a truck to take my box away to-morrow morning.”

And the padrone was too much a man of his world to ask any more questions.

There had been no rooms vacant in the pension in Piazza Indipendenza. The manservant who answered the door had recommended an Italian lady who took paying guests, and Olive had gone to see her, but her rooms were small, dark and dingy, and they smelt overpoweringly of sandal wood and rancid oil. The shabbily-smart padrona had been voluble and even affectionate. “I am so fond of the English,” she said. “My husband is much occupied and I am often lonely, but we shall be able to go out together and amuse ourselves, you and I. I had been hoping to get an invitation to go to the Trecento ball at the Palazzo Vecchio, but Luigi cannot manage it. Never mind! We will go to all the Veglioni. I love dancing.” She looked complacently down at her stubby little feet in their down-at-heel beaded slippers.

Olive had been glad to get away when she heard the impossible terms, but the afternoon was passing, and when she got to the house in the Via dei Bardi she saw bills of sale plastered on its walls and a litter of straw and torn paper in the courtyard. The porter came out of his lodge to tell her that one of the daughters had died.

“They all went away, and the furniture was sold yesterday.”

As Olive had never really wished to live and eat with strangers she was not greatly depressed by these experiences, but she was cold and tired, and her head ached, and when on her way back to the Aquila Verde she saw a card, “Affitasi, una camera, senza mobilia,” in the doorway of one of the old houses in the Borgo San Jacopo, she went in and up the long flight of steep stone stairs without any definite idea of what she wanted beyond a roof to shelter her.

A shrivelled, snuffy old woman showed her the room. It was very large and lofty, and it had two great arched windows that looked out upon the huddled roofs of Oltr’Arno. The brick floor was worn and weather-stained, as were the white-washed walls.

“It was a loggia, but some of the arches have been filled in and the others glazed. Ten lire a month, signorina. As to water, there is a good fountain in the courtyard.”

Olive moved in next day.

Heaven helps those who help themselves, she thought, as she borrowed a broom from her landlady to sweep the floor. The morning was fine and she opened the windows wide and let the sun and air in. At noon she went down into the Borgo and bought fried polenta for five soldi and a slice of chestnut cake at the cook shop, and filled her kettle with clear cold water from the fountain in the courtyard.

Later, as she waited for the water to boil over her little spirit lamp, she made a list of absolute necessaries. She had paid a month’s rent in advance, and fifty-three lire remained to her. Fifty-three lire out of which she must buy a straw mattress, a camp-stool, two blankets, some crockery and soap.

She went out presently to do her shopping and came back at dusk. She was young enough to rather enjoy the novelty of her proceedings, and she slept well that night on the floor, pillowless, and wrapped in her coarse brown coverings; and though the moon shone in upon her through the unshuttered windows for a while she did not dream or wake until the dawn. Olive tried very hard to get work in the days that followed, and she went twice to the registry office in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.

“Ah, you were here before.” A stout woman came bustling out from the room behind the shop to speak to her the second time. “There is nothing for you, signorina mia. The ladies who come here will not take anyone without a character, and a written reference from Milan or Rome is no good. I told you so before. Last winter Contessa Foscoli had an English maid with a written character—not from us, I am glad to say—and she ran away with the chauffeur after a fortnight, and took a diamond ring and the Contessa’s pearls with her. If you cannot tell me who you were with last I shall not be able to help you.”

“The Marchesa Lorenzoni,” Olive said.

The woman drew in her breath with a hissing noise, then she smiled, not pleasantly. “Why did you not say so before? I have heard of you, of course. The little English girl! Well, I can’t help you, my dear. This is a registry office.”

Olive walked out of the shop at once, but she heard the woman calling to someone in the room at the back to come and look at her, and she felt her cheeks burning as she crossed the road. “The little English girl!” What were they saying about her?

One morning she went into one of the English tea-rooms. It was kept by two elderly maiden ladies, and one of them came forward to ask her what she wanted. The Pagoda was deserted at that hour, a barren wilderness of little bamboo tables and chairs, tea-less and cake-less. The walls were distempered green and sparsely decorated with Japanese paper fans, and Olive noticed them and the pattern of the carpet and remembered them afterwards as one remembers the frieze, the engravings, the stale periodicals in a dentist’s waiting-room.

“Do—do you want a waitress?”

The older woman’s face changed. Oh, that change! The girl knew it so well now that she saw it ten times a day.

“No. My sister and I manage very well, and we have an Italian maid to do the washing up.”

“Thank you,” Olive said, faltering. “You don’t know anyone who wants an English girl? I have been very well educated. At least—”

“I am afraid not.”

Poor Olive. She was an unskilled workwoman, not especially gifted in any way or fitted by her upbringing to earn her daily bread. Long years of her girlhood had been spent at a select school, and in the result she knew a part of the Book of Kings by heart, with the Mercy speech from the Merchant of Venice and the date of the Norman Conquest. Every day she bought the Fieramosca, and she tried to see the other local papers when they came out. Several people advertised who wanted to exchange lessons, but no one seemed inclined to pay. Once she saw names she knew in the social column.

“The Marchese Lorenzoni is going to Monte Carlo, and he will join the Marchesa and Miss Whittaker in Cairo later in the season.”

“Prince Tor di Rocca is going to Egypt for Christmas.”