r spoken roughly.

"You are hard to please, my dear," he had sometimes said.

But that had been almost the strongest expression of his displeasure. It
was not, indeed, that he had exercised very great self-control in the
matter, for he had little power of that sort over himself. If he was
habitually mild and gentle in his manner with Gloria, it was rather
because, like many Italians, he dreaded emotion as something like an
illness, and could avoid it to some extent merely by not speaking freely
of what he felt. Silence was generally easy to him; and he had not
broken out more than two or three times in all his life, as he had done
on that afternoon alone with Francesca.

The inevitable consequence followed immediately,--a consequence as much
physical as mental, for when he went away from the Palazzetto, his clear
dark eyes were bloodshot and yellow, and his hands had trembled so that
he had hardly been able to find the armholes of his great-coat in
putting it on. He walked with an uncertain and agitated step, glancing
to right and left of him as he went, half-fiercely, half-timidly, as
though he expected a new adversary to spring upon him from every corner.
The straight line of the houses waned and shivered in the dusk, as he
looked at them, and he saw flashes of light in the air. His head was hot
and aching, and his hat hurt him. Altogether he was in a dangerous
state, not unlike that which, with northern men, sometimes follows hard
drinking.

He hated to go home that evening. So far as he was conscious, he had
neither misrepresented nor in any way exaggerated the miseries of his
domestic existence; and he felt that it was before him now, precisely as
he had described it. There would be the same questions, to which he
would give the same answers, at which Gloria would put on the same
expression of injured hopelessness, unless she broke out and lost her
temper, which happened often enough. The prospect was intolerable.
Reanda thrust his hands deep into the pocket of his overcoat, and glared
about him as he turned the corner of the Via degli Astalli, and saw the
Corso in the distance. But he did not slacken his pace as he went along
under the gloomy walls of the Austrian Embassy--the Palace of
Venice--the most grim and fortress-like of all Roman palaces.

He felt as a poor man may feel when, hot and feverish from working by a
furnace, he knows that he must face the winter storm of freezing sleet
and piercing wind in