uld release him, and she did not seem to have the
slightest intention of doing so.

He savagely clenched his white teeth when he remembered the ridiculous
waiting lackey he had been made to turn into in the last week. Then he
looked up and tried to take interest in the quaint gateway through which
he was passing and on up to the unique town and the square where is the
ancient Podesta's palace, now the hotel. But he was in a mood of rasping
cynicism--even the exquisite evening sunlight seemed to mock at him.

His highly trained eye took in the wonderful old-world beauty around him
with some sense of unconscious satisfaction, but the saintly calm of the
place made no impression upon him. Santa Fina and her flowers could not
soften or bring peace to his galled soul. The knowledge that the whole
situation was the result of his own doings kept his bitterness always at
white heat. The expression of his thin, haggard face was sardonic, and
the groups of simple children, accustomed to ask any stranger for stamps
for their collections--a queer habit of the place--turned away from him
when once they had looked into his eyes.

He left his motor at the hotel and wandered into the square where the
remains of the palazzos of the two great Guelph and Ghibelline families,
the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci, frown at one another not fifty yards
apart--shorn of their splendors, but the Salvucci still with two towers
from which to hurl destruction at their enemies.

John Derringham looked up at the balcony whence Dante had spoken, and
round to the Cathedral and the picturesque square. The few people who
passed seemed not in tune with his thoughts, so calm and saintly was the
type of their faces--all in keeping with a place where a house of the
sixteenth century is considered so aggressively modern as not to be of
any interest. It was too late for him now to go into the Cathedral;
nothing but the fortress battlements were possible, and he hobbled
there, desiring to see the sunset from its superb elevation.

The gate-keeper, homely and simple, opened to him courteously, and he
went in to the first little courtyard, with its fig tree in the middle
and old grass-grown well surrounded by olives and lilac bushes; and then
he climbed the open stairs to the bastion, from whose battlements there
is to be obtained the most perfect view imaginable of the country, the
like of which Benozzo Gozzoli loved to paint.

It has not changed in the least s