, but of course that was impossible. Our apartment is
convenient, but small and rather dark. Maria hopes you are fatter. She
is going to send you some _panforte_ and a box of sugared fruits at
Christmas. _La Zia_ has begun to crochet another counterpane; that
will be the eighth, and we have only three beds. _Pazienza!_ It amuses
her."

Though Olive was not happy at the Palazzo Lorenzoni, she could not
wish that she had stayed with her cousins. She felt that their little
life would have stifled her. Thinking of them, she saw them, happier
than before, since poor Gemma had not been easy to live with, and
quite satisfied to do the same things every day, waddling out of a
morning to early mass and the marketing, eating and sleeping during
the noon hours, and in the evenings going to hear the music _in
piazza_.

Olive was not happy. She was one of those women whose health depends
upon their spirits, and of late she had felt her loneliness to be
almost unbearable. Her youth had cried for all, or nothing. She would
have her love winged and crowned; he should come to her before all the
world. Never would she set her foot in secret gardens, or let joy come
to her by hidden ways, but now she faced the future and saw that it
was grey, and she was afraid.

It seemed to her that she was destined to live always in the Social
Limbo, suspended between heaven and earth, an alien in the
drawing-room and not received in the kitchen. One might as well be
_declassee_ at once, she thought, and yet she knew that that must be
hell.

If Avenel came to Florence and sought her out would she be weak as
Gemma had been, light as Mamie was? Olive knelt for a while on the
stones, and her lips moved, though her prayer was inarticulate.

Sunset was burning across the Val d'Arno, and the river flowed as a
stream of pure gold under the dark of the historic bridges. Already
lights sparkled in the windows of the old houses over the Ponte
Vecchio, and the bells of all the churches were ringing the Ave Maria
as she passed through the whining crowd of beggars at the gate of the
Campo Santo and went slowly down the hill. The blessed hour of peace
and silence was over now, and she must trudge back through the
clamorous streets to be with Mamie, to meet the Marchese's horribly
observant eyes, and to be everlastingly quiet and complacent and
useful. She was paid for that.

She was going up to her room when the lodge porter ran up the stairs
after her with