his gentle, unsurprised voice, was to the
bare-headed figure that smiled up at him from the road.

"You, Margery?... What a game. But what have you done with the Hebrew?
Oh, that's Stephen, isn't it. That accounts for it: but how did he get
you? I say, you can't have slept anywhere; there's _been_ nowhere, for
miles. And have you left Leslie to roam alone among the Objects of Beauty
with his own unsophisticated taste for guide? I suppose he's chucked
you at last; very decent-spirited of him, I think, don't you, Stephen?"

"I chucked him," Peter explained, "because he bought a sham Carlo Dolci.
I drew the line at that. Though if one must have a Carlo Dolci, I suppose
it had better be a sham one, on the whole. Anyhow, I came away and took
to the road. We sleep in ditches, and we like it very much, and I make
tea every morning in my little kettle. I'm going to Florence to help
Leslie to buy bronze things for his grates--dogs, you know, and shovels
and things. Leslie will have been there for three days now; I do wonder
what he's bought."

"You'd better come on in the car," Urquhart said. "Both of you. Why is
Stephen looking so proud? I shall be at Florence for breakfast. _You_
won't, though. Bad luck. Come along; there's loads of room."

Rodney stood by the wall. He was unlike Peter in this, that his
resentment towards a person who motored across Tuscany between dusk and
dawn was in no way lessened by the discovery of who it was.

Peter stood, his feet deep in dust, and smiled at Urquhart. Rodney
watched the two a little cynically from the wall. Peter looked what he
was--a limping vagabond tramp, dust-smeared, bare-headed, very much
part of the twilight road. In spite of his knapsack, he had the air of
possessing nothing and smiling over the thought.

Peter said, "How funny," meaning the combination of Urquhart and the
motor-car and Tuscany and the grey dawn and Rodney and himself; Urquhart
was smiling down at them, his face pale in the strange dawn-twilight.
The scene was symbolical of their whole relations; it seemed as if
Urquhart, lifted triumphantly above the road's dust, had always so smiled
down on Peter, in his vagabond weakness.

"I don't think," Urquhart was saying, "that you ought to walk so far in
the night. It's weakening." To Urquhart Peter had always been a brittle
incompetent, who could not do things, who kept breaking into bits if
roughly handled.

"Rodney and I don't think," Peter returned, in the