essing hard on
Tito for the first time.

He was going back to his lodgings in the Piazza di San Giovanni, but he
avoided passing through the Mercato Vecchio, which was his nearest way,
lest he should see Tessa. He was not in the humour to seek anything; he
could only await the first sign of his altering lot.

The piazza with its sights of beauty was lit up by that warm morning
sunlight under which the autumn dew still lingers, and which invites to
an idlesse undulled by fatigue. It was a festival morning, too, when
the soft warmth seems to steal over one with a special invitation to
lounge and gaze. Here, too, the signs of the fair were present; in the
spaces round the octagonal baptistery, stalls were being spread with
fruit and flowers, and here and there laden mules were standing quietly
absorbed in their nose-bags, while their drivers were perhaps gone
through the hospitable sacred doors to kneel before the blessed Virgin
on this morning of her Nativity. On the broad marble steps of the Duomo
there were scattered groups of beggars and gossiping talkers: here an
old crone with white hair and hard sunburnt face encouraging a
round-capped baby to try its tiny bare feet on the warmed marble, while
a dog sitting near snuffed at the performance suspiciously; there a
couple of shaggy-headed boys leaning to watch a small pale cripple who
was cutting a face on a cherry-stone; and above them on the wide
platform men were making changing knots in laughing desultory chat, or
else were standing in close couples gesticulating eagerly.

But the largest and most important company of loungers was that towards
which Tito had to direct his steps. It was the busiest time of the day
with Nello, and in this warm season and at an hour when clients were
numerous, most men preferred being shaved under the pretty red and white
awning in front of the shop rather than within narrow walls. It is not
a sublime attitude for a man, to sit with lathered chin thrown backward,
and have his nose made a handle of; but to be shaved was a fashion of
Florentine respectability, and it is astonishing how gravely men look at
each other when they are all in the fashion. It was the hour of the
day, too, when yesterday's crop of gossip was freshest, and the barber's
tongue was always in its glory when his razor was busy; the deft
activity of those two instruments seemed to be set going by a common
spring. Tito foresaw that it would be impossible for h