narrator--while in reality the freedom of a man's personal utterance
_may_ be owing to his lack of the egotistic. Partly for my
friend's sake, therefore, I shall tell the story as--what indeed it
is--a narrative of my own concerning him.



Chapter II

With his parents.


The lingering, long-drawn-out _table d'hote_ dinner was just over in
one of the inns on the _cornice_ road. The gentlemen had gone into the
garden, and some of the ladies to the _salotto_, where open windows
admitted the odours of many a flower and blossoming tree, for it was
toward the end of spring in that region. One had sat down to a
tinkling piano, and was striking a few chords, more to her own
pleasure than that of the company. Two or three were looking out into
the garden, where the diaphanous veil of twilight had so speedily
thickened to the crape of night, its darkness filled with thousands of
small isolated splendours--fire-flies, those "golden boats" never seen
"on a sunny sea," but haunting the eves of the young summer, pulsing,
pulsing through the dusky air with seeming aimlessness, like sweet
thoughts that have no faith to bind them in one. A tall, graceful
woman stood in one of the windows alone. She had never been in Italy
before, had never before seen fire-flies, and was absorbed in the
beauty of their motion as much as in that of their golden
flashes. Each roving star had a tide in its light that rose and ebbed
as it moved, so that it seemed to push itself on by its own radiance,