t his side, holding fast
to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with
him to see my mother--I can see just how you looked holding so fast to
that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you
remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."

"No!"

"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of
the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a
tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to
his turn."

"Yes--yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists
of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder
of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the
fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come
up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said
it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road
I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."

"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I
frightened for fear you would tumble off!"

"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely--and--and that is all
I do remember. What then?"

She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she
tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the
current of this past association?

"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big
thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I
had gone to Switzerland--we were always on the move."

The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they
had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an
Arizona sky.

Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic
touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage
distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of
Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past;
they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoying
Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal
Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to
his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not
really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the
power of divination; for if he had it he might