in person, hoping to be
received; but a maid informed him that her mistress was in great pain
and could see no one. On the Saturday, towards five o'clock, he came
back once more, still hoping for better luck.

He left his house on foot. The evening was chill and gray, and a heavy
leaden twilight was settling over the city. The lamps were already
lighted round the fountain in the Piazza Barberini like pale tapers
round a funeral bier, and the Triton, whether being under repair or for
some other reason, had ceased to spout water. Down the sloping roadway
came a line of carts drawn by two or three horses harnessed in single
file, and bands of workmen returning home from the new buildings. A
group of these came swaying along arm in arm, singing a lewd song at the
pitch of their voices.

Andrea stopped to let them pass. Two or three of the debased,
weather-beaten faces impressed themselves on his memory. He noticed that
a carter had his hand wrapped in a blood-stained bandage, and that
another, who was kneeling in his cart, had the livid complexion, deep
sunken eyes and convulsively contracted mouth of a man who has been
poisoned. The words of the song were mingled with guttural cries, the
cracking of whips, the grinding of wheels, the jingling of horse bells
and shrill discordant laughter.

His mental depression increased. He found himself in a very curious
mood. The sensibility of his nerves was so acute that the most trivial
impression conveyed to them by external means assumed the gravity of a
wound. While one fixed thought occupied and tormented his spirit, the
rest of his being was left exposed to the rude jostling of surrounding
circumstances. Groups of sensations rushed with lightning rapidity
across his mental field of vision, like the phantasmagoria of a magic
lantern, startling and alarming him. The banked-up clouds of evening,
the form of the Triton surrounded by the cadaverous lights, this sudden
descent of savage looking men and huge animals, these shouts and songs
and curses aggravated his condition, arousing a vague terror in his
heart, a foreboding of disaster.

A closed carriage drove out of the palace garden. He caught a glimpse of
a lady bowing to him, but he failed to recognise her. The palace rose up
before him, vast as some royal residence. The windows of the first floor
gleamed with violet reflections, a pale strip of sunset sky rested just
above it; a brougham was turning away from the door.