Michele lowered his arm, feeling ridiculous. He strolled over, gave the parking man one hundred lire, and found his hot little car. “Addio,” he muttered into the rearview mirror as he watched her disappear into the cloister, as heedless of his poetry as the statue had been of her own.

He reversed the car loudly, right up against the railing that protected the grand duke, and drove out of the square.

LEAVE IT TO ME

“The question is,” said Miss Helena Palmer, as they changed gear for the last long spiral of country road, “how would I have managed without you?”

The young man at the wheel thought the question quite otherwise, slowing down as he asked the air, “Is this it, then? Is this it?”

His young wife beside him pointed out a signpost beyond. “Of course it is. Look, it says.” They drew up to the notice; there was the name of the proprietor of all that land, and who knew what else besides, surmounting a prohibition against hunting. “The house must be up there, over the curve. You can see where the avenue begins.”

“Good for you,” her husband said, accelerating again, “spotting that.” Though in fact the notice could not have been missed, its white paint now luminous in the setting sun that was throwing up from the landscape all manner of objects—a dovecote, a scarecrow, a tractor—that would have been dormant in a softer light.

“Sorry,” the girl, Marian, said as they drove on, remembering they had interrupted Miss Helena Palmer. Turning round from the front seat where she sat in her newly married fastness, deliciously paired, two to Miss Palmer’s one, she put her bent brown arm over the back and gazed on Miss Palmer with superior happiness—quite looking out from the golden bar of heaven, as Miss Palmer put it to herself, though not ill-naturedly, wishing them both well.

“My thanks for giving me a lift. That was it. I’d have hated to pass through Florence without seeing the Fenwicks. But how to get out here, if it hadn’t been for you?”

“It’s not so far as it looks. All these curves make it seem a long way. Anyhow, delighted.” And she really does seem nice, thought the young man at the wheel, a good old girl. A Raeburn, with her coloring, prim yet all aglow. What would the old thing be, fifty? He was an art historian, spending his honeymoon at Florence that summer, helping here and there with the restoration of flood damage.

The girl continued to lean her bare arm over the back of the seat, chatting with Miss Palmer, flicking back long gold hair with a smile that said, Aren’t we young? Aren’t we nice? Miss Palmer could not but agree.