d if he felt anything at such times it was assuredly not fear.
He had good qualities, and courage was one of them, if courage may be
called a quality at all. Ruggiero was not at all sure that his new
master liked the sea, and it is possible that the Count was not sure of
the fact himself; but for the time, it suited him to sail as much as
possible, because Beatrice Granmichele was fond of it, and would
therefore amuse herself with excursions hither and thither during the
summer. As her mother rarely accompanied her, San Miniato could not,
according to the customs of the country, join her in her boat, and the
next best thing was to keep one for himself and to be as often as
possible alongside of her, and ready to go ashore with her if she took
a fancy to land in some quiet spot.

The Marchesa di Mola, having quite made up her mind that her daughter
should marry San Miniato, and being almost too indolent about minor
matters to care for appearances, would have allowed the two to be
together from morning till night under the very least shadow of a
chaperon's supervision, if Beatrice herself had shown a greater
inclination for San Miniato's society than she actually did. But
Beatrice was the only one of the party who had arrived at no distinct
determination in the matter. San Miniato attracted her, and was very
well in his way, but that was all. Amidst the shoals of migratory
Neapolitans with magnificent titles and slender purses, who appeared,
disported themselves and disappeared again, at the summer resort, it was
quite possible that one might be found with more to recommend him than
San Miniato could boast. Most of them were livelier than he, and
certainly all were noisier. Many of them had very bright black eyes,
which Beatrice liked, and they were all dressed a little beyond the
extreme of the fashion, a fact of which she was too young to understand
the psychological value in judging of men. Some of them sang very
prettily, and San Miniato did not possess any similar accomplishment.
Indeed, in the young girl's opinion, he approached dangerously near to
being a "serious" man, as the Italians express it, and but for his known
love of gambling he might have seemed to her altogether too dull a
personage to be thought of as a possible husband. It is not easy to
define exactly what is meant in Italian by a "serious" man. The word
does not exactly translate the French equivalent, still less the English
one. It means something