t, however, successful; for certain difficulties arose that
were insurmountable.

The trio left Florence at the beginning of May, but I was left alone
with the car and with the Italian servants to idle away the days as best
I could. They had all three gone to Aix, I think.

The only other Englishman left in Florence appeared to be a man I had
recently re-encountered, named Charlie Whitaker. He and I had become
great friends, as we had been several years before. I often took him for
a run on the car, to Bologna, Livorno, or Siena, and we used to meet
nearly every evening.

One stifling August night Florence lay gasping.

Above the clatter of the cafe, the music, the laughter of women and the
loud chatter in Italian, the strident cries of the newsvendors rose in
the great moonlit Piazza, with its huge equestrian statue of the beloved
Vittorio looming dark against the steely sky.

Only the _popolo_, the merry, brown-faced, easy-going Florentines, were
still in the sun-baked city. All Society, even the richer tradesmen, and
certainly all the foreign residents, had fled--all of the latter save
two, Charlie and myself.

You, who know the quaint old mediaeval city in the winter "season," when
the smart balls are given at the Corsini or the Strozzi, when the
Cascine is filled with pretty women at four o'clock, and the jewellers
on the Ponte Vecchio put forth their imitation cinquecento wares, would
not know it in August, when beneath that fiery Tuscan sun it is as a
city of the dead by day, while at night the lower classes come forth
from their slums to idle, to gossip, and to enjoy the _bel fresco_ after
the heat and burden of the day.

On an August night the little dark-eyed seamstress sits and enjoys her
ice at the same tin-topped table at the Gambrinus where the foreign
Princess has sat in April. In winter Florence is a city of the wealthy;
in summer it is given over entirely to the populace. So great is the
sweltering, breathless heat, that everyone who can leave Florence in
August leaves it. The great villas and palaces are closed; the Florence
Club, that most exclusive institution in Europe, is shut up; the hotels
move up to Camaldoli, to Pracchia, or to Abetone; and to be seen in
Florence in those blazing days causes wonder and comment.

Charlie and I were the only two foreigners in Florence. I had remained
on at the orders of Bindo, and Charlie--well, he remained for the best
of reasons, because he hadn't the