have no wish that
you should--until after I am dead. You are my only friend, and yet I
have to ask you to forgive. Here is the letter," he added, drawing an
envelope from his pocket and handing it to me. "Take it to-night, for I
never know if I may live to see another day."

I took it, and noting its big black seal, placed it carefully in my
inner pocket. Two loafers were standing in the shadow in front of us,
and their presence reminded me that that end of the Lung Arno is not
very safe at night. Therefore we turned, slowly retracing our steps back
to the quaint old bridge with the houses upon it--the Ponte Vecchio.

Just before we reached it my companion stopped, and grasping my hand
suddenly, said in a choking voice--

"You have been my only friend since my downfall, Ewart. Without you, I
should have starved. These very clothes I wear were bought with money
you have so generously given me. I can never thank you sufficiently. You
have prolonged a useless and broken life, but it will soon be at an end,
and I shall no longer be a burden to you."

"A burden? What rubbish! You're not yourself to-night, Whitaker. Cheer
up, for Heaven's sake."

"Can a condemned man laugh? Well," he added, with a mocking smile, "I'll
try. Come, old fellow, let's go back to the Gambrinus and have another
bock--before we part. I've got a franc--one of yours--so I'll stand it!"

And we walked on to the big Piazza, with its music and its garish cafes,
the customers of which overflowed into the square, where they sat in
great groups.

Italy is indeed a complex country, and contains more of the flotsam and
jetsam of English derelicts than any other country in all Europe. Every
Italian town has its own _coterie_ of broken-down Englishmen and
Englishwomen, the first-mentioned mostly sharks, and the latter mostly
drunkards. Truly the shifty existence led by these exiles presents a
strange phrase of life, so essentially cosmopolitan and yet so
essentially tragic.

It was half-past one when I left my friend to walk home out of the town
through the narrow Via Romana. The ill-lit neighbourhood through which I
had to pass was somewhat unsafe late at night, but being well known in
Florence I never feared, and was walking briskly, full of thought of my
own love-romance, when, of a sudden, two rough-looking men coming out of
a side street collided with me, apologised, and went off hurriedly.

At first I felt bewildered, so sudden was the encounter