her arm,
hurrying her along without slackening his pace. She seemed like a girl
in a dream. Truly, she was very handsome, a strange tragic figure amid
all the hubbub of Florence, the old-world city of noise and of narrow
streets, where Counts and _contadini_ rub shoulders, and the
tradesmen are ever on the look out to profit--if only a few
soldi--upon the innocent foreigner.

Firenze la Bella--or Florence as the average Englishman knows it--is
surely a city of strange people and of strange moods. By the
discordant clanging of its church bells the laughter-loving
Florentines are moved to gaiety, or to piety, and by the daily
articles in the local journals, the _Nazione_ or the _Fieramosca_,
they can be incited to riot or violence. The Tuscans, fine
aristocratic nobles with ten centuries of lineage behind them, and
splendid peasants with all their glorious traditions of feudal
servitude under the "nobile," are, after all, like children, with a
simplicity that is astounding, combined with a cunning that is
amazing.

Along the Via Calzajoli I followed the pair in breathless eagerness.
At that hour of the morning the central thoroughfare is always
crowded by business men, cooks out shopping, and open-mouthed
_forestieri_--the foreigners who come, guide-book in hand, to
gaze at and admire the thousand wonderful monuments of the ancient
city of Medici. The girl's face certainly resembled very closely that
of the dead girl Gabrielle Engledue. The countenance I had seen at
Stretton Street was white and lifeless, while that of the girl was
fresh and rosy. Nevertheless, that blank expression upon her face,
and the fact that her companion had linked his arm in hers, both
pointed to the fact that either her vision was dim, or her great dark
eyes were actually sightless. The man was fairly well dressed, but
the girl was very shabby. Her rusty black, her cheap stockings, her
down-at-heel shoes, and her faded hat combined to present a picture
of poverty. Indeed, the very fact of the neglect of her dress was
increasing evidence that her vision was dim, for surely she would not
go forth with the rent in the elbow of her blouse. Did she know that
it was torn?

Just as we were passing the ancient church of Or San Michele, with its
wonderful armorial bearings by Luca della Robbia, an old man with long
white hair and beard, whom I took to be one of the mangy painters who
copy the masterpieces in the Uffizi or the Pitti, passed by, and