her store, Italian
ones, proving that he was not wholly without some share of her gift in
that line; but he now and then politely stopped her flow and led her to
admire with him the beauties of the road, natural or architectural, a
distant glimpse, a form, a fragrance. He would explain things to her,
impart scraps of pertinent history, which she would appear trying to
appreciate and imprint on her memory.

As he leaned back in the carriage at her side, bathed in the wavering
green and gold light of the chestnut-trees among which the road wended,
a recent description of him, which she had said over to herself, to
qualify it by mitigating adjectives, seemed to her to have become
altogether unfair. Gerald's face, beneath the brim of his pliable white
straw, bent down over the eyes and turned up at the back, Italian style,
did not look sickly. On the contrary, it looked better and stronger
since his illness; he even had a little color. He was not sad-eyed,
either, that she could see, though his eyes must always be the
thoughtful kind. As for spindle-shanked, he filled his loose woolen
clothes better than before.

He had made himself modestly fine for the day to be spent in company of
the fair: he had on a necktie which, if expressive of mood, declared his
outlook on life to be cheerfuller: it was a vibrant tone of violet that
accorded agreeably with his gray suit. A rose-geranium leaf and a stem
or two of rusty-gold _gaggia_, odors that he loved, occupied at his
buttonhole the place of those decorations which distinguished elderly
gentlemen are sometimes envied for, and which--it is a commonplace--are
not worthy to be exchanged for the flower Youth sticks at his coat to
aid him to charm.

It grew very warm; the way, though pleasant, was beginning to seem long
when they arrived. The old monastery, now a school of forestry; the
Cross of Savoy, where pilgrims rest and dine, gleamed white in the
cloudless noon, amid the century-old trees that long ago, before Dante's
time even, earned for the spot its beautiful name of Vallombrosa,
Umbrageous Vale.

Aurora was by this time starving again, and Gerald knew the pleasure of
purveying to the demands of a stomach as untroubled by any back-thought
relating to its functioning as that of a big bloomy goddess seated
before a meal of ambrosia. He suggested that she accompany her artichoke
omelet, her cutlet with the sauce of anchovy, parsley and mustard, by a
little red wine. But she