pretty and kindly woman, who probably imagined him as heart-broken as
ever. He was very willing to see more of her, if she wished; but with
the rain beginning to fall more thick and chill in the darkening street,
he could have postponed their next meeting till a pleasanter evening
without great self-denial. He felt a little twinge of rheumatism in his
shoulder when he got into his room, for your room in a Florentine hotel
is always some degrees colder than outdoors, unless you have fire in it;
and with the sun shining on his windows when he went out after lunch, it
had seemed to Colville ridiculous to have his morning fire kept up. The
sun was what he had taken the room for. It was in it, the landlord
assured him, from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon; and so,
in fact, it was, when it shone; but even then it was not fully in it,
but had a trick of looking in at the sides of the window, and painting
the chamber wall with a delusive glow. Colville raked away the ashes of
his fire-place, and throwing on two or three fagots of broom and pine
sprays, he had a blaze that would be very pretty to dress by after
dinner, but that gave out no warmth for the present. He left it, and
went down to the reading-room, as it was labelled over the door, in
homage to a predominance of English-speaking people among the guests;
but there was no fire there; that was kindled only by request, and he
shivered at the bare aspect of the apartment, with its cold piano, its
locked bookcases, and its table, where the London _Times_, the _Neue
Freie Presse_ of Vienna, and the _Italie_ of Rome exposed their titles,
one just beyond the margin of the other. He turned from the door and
went into the dining-room, where the stove was ostentatiously roaring
over its small logs and its lozenges of peat, But even here the fire had
been so recently lighted that the warmth was potential rather than
actual. By stooping down before the stove, and pressing his shoulder
against its brass doors, Colville managed to lull his enemy, while he
studied the figures of the woman-headed, woman-breasted hounds