rised that she should curtail their
drive.

They crossed the wide gravelled space outside the gardens and walked
towards the town by the Lung'Arno. Already the cypresses of San
Miniato showed black against the sky, and the reflected flame of
sunset was dying out in the windows of the old houses at the river's
edge. All the people were going one way now, and leaving the
tree-shadowed dusk for the brightly-lit streets, Via Tornabuoni, all
palaces and antiquity shops, and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the
band would play presently.

The two American girls walked together with Don Filippo and Olive
followed them. Edna held herself very erect, but Mamie seemed almost
to lean backwards. She swayed her hips as she went and swung her short
skirts, and there was affectation and a feverish self-consciousness in
her every movement. Olive could not help smiling to herself, but she
remembered that at school she had been afflicted with the idea that a
pout--the delicious _moue_ of fiction--became her, and so she was
inclined to leniency. Only seventeen.

The Prince wore riding gloves, and so the green gleam of his emerald
was hidden from her. If only she could be sure that she had seen him
before. What then? Nothing--if she could think that he would always be
kind to gentle little Edna.

Just before they reached the hotel Miss Marvel joined her, leaving her
cousin to go on with Don Filippo, and began to talk to her.

"The river is just perfect at this hour. Our sitting-room has a
balcony and I sat there last night watching the moon rise over San
Miniato. I guess it looked just that way when Dante wrote his sonnets.
Beatrice must have been real mad with him sometimes, don't you think
so? She must have been longing to say, 'Come on, and don't keep
talking.' But she was a nice high-minded girl, and so she never did.
She simply died."

"If she died for him she must have been a fool," Olive said shortly.
Her eyes were fixed on the Prince's broad back. He was laughing at
some sally of Mamie's.

Edna was shocked. "Don't you just worship Dante?"

"Yes, yes," answered the elder girl. "He was a dear, but even he was
not worth that. At least, I don't know. He was a dear; but I was
thinking of a girl I knew ... perhaps I may tell you about her some
day."

"Yes, do," Edna said perfunctorily. She was trying to hear what her
cousin was saying to Filippo, and wishing she could amuse him as well.
They passed through the wide hall of th