Joanna, more shaken than she knew by the sight of Bob’s handwriting, was relieved, and chagrined, in the same moment. She was tired out too from the journey, irritated by the dust which felt gritty against her skin all over her body, overwrought by the excitement of Mario’s persistent wooing in the dark railway carriage. Throwing back her head, and puckering up her face like a child, she burst out crying. As the first loud desolate wail escaped her she felt tremendous surprise. “I’ve never cried like this before,” she said within herself. “What can be happening to me?” And she went on crying aloud, finding wonderful relief and a kind of healing in the new unrestraint.

Hearing the noise above his own splashing, Mario came running in to her with a frightened face. His hands were wet, and he had taken off his coat and his collar, which made him into a stranger again. He questioned Joanna anxiously. What was wrong? She did not know; but between her astonished sobs she tried to tell him. She was afraid he would be angry. But instead he was kind. She handed him the letter to read, and having glanced through it, he let it fall on the carpet, comforting her with his cool, damp hands. And presently, before she had quite stopped crying, he took her to the mirror and made her laugh at the sight of her dirty, tear-stained cheeks. He pulled the pins out of her hat with his deft fingers, and covered her face with kisses.

“You see I love you, dirt and all!” he said, holding her, laughing at her, brushing the letter and her tears aside as mere childishness. Joanna’s heart was warm with gratitude to him. This man knew how to treat her. And now with his wet pushed-back hair, and his strong bare neck, he looked boyish, different from the Mario she had known before. He had irresistible grace. No one had warned her of the beauty men conceal beneath their disfiguring clothes, their stiff collars.

II

Early next morning she was wakened by the chant of a goatherd passing with his flock under the hotel windows. Hearing it first in her dreams, this most fascinating of Florentine street-cries seemed to her a melody of unearthly sweetness. Then following, and mingling with it, came other strange cries and sounds floating from the foreign street through the closed shutters into the quiet high-walled room. It was dark in the room, but she became immediately aware that sunlight of a kind she had never yet seen was filling the outside world, beating strongly like waves against the fast-bolted shutters.