a twelvemonth before the time
to which I began by alluding, and had learned then that Mr. Ambient was
in distant lands--was making a considerable tour in the East: so there
was nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London
again. It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left
England, and, with her little boy, their only child, was spending the
period of her husband's absence--a good many months--at a small place
they had down in Surrey. They had a house in London which was let. All
this I learned, and also that Mrs. Ambient was charming (my friend the
American poet, from whom I had my introduction, had never seen her, his
relations with the great man being only epistolary); but she was
not, after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of
_Beltraffio_, and I did not go down into Surrey to call on her. I went
to the Continent, spent the following winter in Italy, and returned to
London in May. My visit to Italy opened my eyes to a good many things,
but to nothing more than the beauty of certain pages in the works of
Mark Ambient I had every one of his productions in my portmanteau,--they
are not, as you know, very numerous, but he had preluded to _Beltraffio_
by some exquisite things,--and I used to read them over in the evening
at the inn. I used to say to myself that the man who drew those
characters and wrote that style understood what he saw and knew what he
was doing. This is my only reason for mentioning my winter in Italy.
He had been there much in former years, and he was saturated with what
painters call the "feeling" of that classic land. He expressed the
charm of the old hill-cities of Tuscany, the look of certain lonely
grass-grown places which, in the past, had echoed with life; he
understood the great artists, he understood the spirit of the
Renaissance, he understood everything. The scene of one of his earlier
novels was laid in Borne, the scene of another in Florence, and I moved
through these cities in company with the figures whom Mark Ambient had
set so vividly upon their feet. This is why I was now so much happier
even than before in the prospect of making his acquaintance.

At last, when I had dallied with this privilege long enough, I
despatched to him the missive of the American poet He had already gone
out of town; he shrank from the rigor of the London "season" and it was
his habit to migrate on the first of June. Moreover, I had heard that
this yea