y,
slowly to expire, and hanging, motionless hands which at last made no
resistance when his own offered to take them. When, of old, a man was
burnt at the stake it was cruel to have to be present; but if one was
present it was kind to lend a hand to pile up the fuel and make the
flames do their work quickly and the smoke muffle up the victim. With
all deference to your kindness, this was perhaps an obligation you would
especially feel if you had a reversionary interest in something the
victim was to leave behind him.

One morning, in the midst of all this, Rowland walked heedlessly out of
one of the city gates and found himself on the road to Fiesole. It was a
completely lovely day; the March sun felt like May, as the English poet
of Florence says; the thick-blossomed shrubs and vines that hung over
the walls of villa and podere flung their odorous promise into the warm,
still air. Rowland followed the winding, climbing lanes; lingered, as he
got higher, beneath the rusty cypresses, beside the low parapets, where
you look down on the charming city and sweep the vale of the Arno;
reached the little square before the cathedral, and rested awhile in the
massive, dusky church; then climbed higher, to the Franciscan convent
which is poised on the very apex of the mountain. He rang at the little
gateway; a shabby, senile, red-faced brother admitted him with almost
maudlin friendliness. There was a dreary chill in the chapel and the
corridors, and he passed rapidly through them into the delightfully
steep and tangled old garden which runs wild over the forehead of the
great hill. He had been in it before, and he was very fond of it. The
garden hangs in the air, and you ramble from terrace to terrace and
wonder how it keeps from slipping down, in full consummation of its
bereaved forlornness, into the nakedly romantic gorge beneath. It was
just noon when Rowland went in, and after roaming about awhile he flung
himself in the sun on a mossy stone bench and pulled his hat over his
eyes. The short shadows of the brown-coated cypresses above him had
grown very long, and yet he had not passed back through the convent. One
of the monks, in his faded snuff-colored robe, came wandering out into
the garden, reading his greasy little breviary. Suddenly he came toward
the bench on which Rowland had stretched himself, and paused a moment,
attentively. Rowland was lingering there still; he was sitting with his
head in his hands and his elb