mer
rejection, "those are the cases we simply must not allow ourselves to
think about. If we begin to think of cases like that...."

She did not finish and he said no more, but in the darkness through
which the fiery point of his cigar continued for some time to glow, it
is to be feared the faces of both went on to reflect for nobody to see
the working of those thoughts precisely which Mrs. Foss had said with so
much emphasis they must guard against.

CHAPTER II

Upon a day not much later in the month--a goodly day which thousands
without a doubt were thinking all too short for the useful or merely
delectable things they wanted to do--a certain young man in Florence
would, if he could, have treated this mellow golden masterpiece of
autumn's like a bad sketch, torn it across and dropped it into the
waste-basket. What is one to do with a day when nothing that has been
invented seems enough fun to pay for the bother? He did not wish to
paint, he did not wish to read, or to play on the piano, as he sometimes
did in solitude, with one hand, to solace himself by re-framing a
remembered melody. He did not wish to go out, but was restless from
staying in. He did not want to see the face of friend or foe, but could
no longer endure to be alone.

He stood for a moment in the middle of the floor, with his hands over
his face, the ends of his fingers pressing back his eyeballs, and got in
his throat a taste of the bitter waters which he felt as a perpetual
pool in the center of his heart. Next minute he sneered at himself, like
a schoolmaster at a boy who blubbers, and without further paltering put
on his hat, took up a very slender cane with a slender grasp of yellow
ivory, and ran down the long stairs of his house to the street.

"Air and exercise, air and exercise!" This prescription he repeated to
himself, and, surely enough, in a quarter of an hour felt better.

He was on Via Tornabuoni. Passing Giacosa's, he glanced in to see if it
were any one he knew taking tea so early behind the great plate glass
window. No, they were chance English. He halted before a shop farther on
to look at a display of jewelry, wondering that there should be fools
enough in the whole world to support one such dealer in turquoise
trinkets that at once drop out their stones; crude, big mosaics, and
everlasting little composition-silver copies of the Strozzi lantern.

He crossed the street and entered the bank, where he found the usual