ties of the Americans and English. Nor the overdressed fops and the narrowwaisted officers who drank numerous cocktails at the three Anglo-Italian cafés on the via Tornabuoni. Nor the womenoglers of the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. It was the overhanging roof of the Palazzo del Arte della Lana that appealed to him. It was the Ghiberti bronze doors and Cimabue's madonna in the Rucellai chapel that thrilled him to the bone.

He gave his life to them. He came to Florence when he was twenty-nine. A moderate income afforded him all that he needed in those days. Twice it was increased by inheritances. Four times what it was originally, it furnished what he needed still. So he stayed. At first in rooms and now at the villa. At first bewildered and lonely. Now with friends and stability. Secure.

In those days he intended to write, and indeed he did write. Later he gave that up. It seemed so pointless when he could spend the same time reading the much finer stuff that others had written. All that kept him from going soft was the fact that he still played tennis. He did this nearly every week-end. He derived a malicious satisfaction from still being able to beat most of the younger men.

To-day he felt none of this satisfaction. Sixty. He hadn't lived! He had only heard life going by him like the silver of distant trumpets! He was suddenly swept by regret.

When Giuseppina arrived with his breakfast, he put to her a question:

"It's my birthday to-day. How old do you think I am?”

Her teeth flashed. "Perhaps fifty, signorino," she said cautiously. "Sixty!"

"Dio mio! But you look like a boy, signorino. You'll live to be a hundred." She grinned, wrinkling her brown face optimistically. Half forthright honesty like the soil she came from, half inherited sagacity in pleasing the signori who were lords of good and evil-what a peasant she really was!

After she went off, he wondered. Like all persons of an inactive selfishness, he found it hard to think of death as coming to him personally. Somehow he would always live, always delight in things.

Nevertheless, did he want to live to be a hundred? Forty years. Suddenly he was conscious of their monotony. Now if one or two things were different-One or two things. That meant Leonie. She flashed before his eyes.

She was married now and had one daughter, who must be the same age that she had been when he knew her. He wondered if the daughter's hair too was dark and her countenance laughingserious and her eyes of deep violet. He wondered if she too were as cool and as fragrant as a camelia flower. Then he smiled at his sentimentality. Suppose he had married Leonie, as he wanted to. Well, for one thing he would probably be a faded English professor or a tired executive of a publishing-house whose reputation was sounder than its finances, instead of sitting here in this garden.

II

HOLLAND PORTER was not the only person in that distant long ago to be fascinated by the lovely Leonie Winslow. Her father was Professor Horatio Winslow of the Harvard history faculty. Living in Cambridge, she had plenty of opportunity to attract admirers. Holland, however, was apparently the first person to make an admirer of her.

What could be more likely? Tall and poetic-looking, he was known also to be literary. He was not a Harvard man, to be sure, having been graduated from Columbia. Nevertheless, poet and editor in a safe way by his middle twenties, he was offered on the strength of this a connection with a Boston publishing-house. He came to Cambridge to live because he liked the academic atmosphere. He was furnished with a letter to Professor Winslow, whose Bay State shrewdness saw instantly an ideal son-in-law in the moderately successful Apollo with sense enough to accept a fixed salary. Professor Winslow introduced him to his daughter.

Consequently the announcement of their engagement-staidly worded, as befitted those days, when to attend a formal ball without white gloves was more serious than to commit adultery-surprised nobody. It broke many hearts.

Holland Porter remembered the day with vividness.

Mrs. Winslow: "My dear children, I'm so happy. Oh! Let me kiss you, dear Holland. But my baby daughter old enough to get married! Óh!"

Professor Winslow: "Allow me to con

gratulate you, Holland. We're very fond of Leonie, but we know you'll be worthy of her. Ha! That is, if anybody will be." Leonie: "Daddy, he's worthy millions and millions of me. You know, dear, I didn't mean to say yes to you. I meant to wait a while. But I'm glad I didn't wait. Really I am." "Leonie!"

The whole world was dancing and flashing before him. He saw goals ahead of him, dreams to attain to, shining castles as lacy-fantastic as frost patterns. Oh, they would assault them, win to them, he and Leonie. And then it all shattered on an absurd lover's quarrel. How silly that quarrel now seemed!

Technically he was in the right and an explanation would have solved everything, but his first words were so rude and angry that she did not give him one. When two days later, appreciating his foolishness, he came back, she demanded an apology. Stupidly he refused one. When two weeks later he was ready to do anything, buy the moon for her, crawl upon his hands and knees across Boston Common, he was greeted with astonishing news. She had run away with Carl Paulin, a man she hardly knew. Holland Porter gave up his position without even a courteous notice. He was on the ocean in a week.

By the time he reached Florence he was as coldly cynical as the March rain that slatted against the black-and-white marbles of the Duomo. Women! A wry, disillusioned face expressed his opinion better than words could. But somehow, though he never married, he changed this attitude. More than one came into his life. The first was the animated Contessa da Ripoli with her lovely brown-golden hair. He met her at one of Colonel Allentown's Sunday teas.

Though Colonel Allentown was charming as usual, they both were bored by the inane conversation. They went into the garden to admire his extraordinary yellow

roses. The roses really were extraordinary. Faintly tinged with pink, the color of an exquisite evening gown, they clambered up one corner of the villa as thickly as honeysuckle. They might have been a symbol of Italy's rich life.

Then he and she started down a smooth gravel walk on either side of which were neat lemon-trees. Elena da Ripoli pointed up at them.

"The golden apples of the Hesperides," she said. Her richly Italian English was sensuous with vowel sounds.

And you one of the three beautiful daughters of Atlas guarding them? Only where's the dragon?"

"Why not Romulus?" She indicated. Allentown's great wolflike sheep-dog. "And I'm afraid that if I have to be Hercules I'll show more interest in at least one of the daughters than I will in the apples I'm supposed to get. I'm afraid that I'll spend most of my time trying to persuade one of the daughters to leave her apple-tree."..

She laughed. It was known that this comely, rich-voiced lady and her husband, the Count da Ripoli, did not live happily together. She courtesied to him with a mock formality. "Toujours le gallant!"

After they had tired of each other, he met Kitty Hoagland, the pretty, emptyheaded wife of Sir Kenneth Hoagland, a large, red-faced, insolent North-of-Englander. Elena. Kitty. And there were others. The little American school-teacher, for instance. No, certainly, he had not lived entirely aloof.

But in all these affairs was the unreality that attaches to what is simply diversion. They were not living, but only its reflection. In them, as in these later years at the villa, life had gone by him like distant silver trumpets. Leonie Winslow, with her dark hair and camelia-fragrant face, was more vivid than their intensest moments.

After he left her he never saw her again, never really heard from her. Once she wrote him, but he tore up the letter. Afterward he regretted this. Another time he read in the Paris Herald that she was coming to Florence. He left abruptly. He doubted that he could see her dispassionately even now.

III

THE soaring flight of his revery was broken without warning by the sounding jangle of the door-bell. He heard Giuseppina hurry from the kitchen to answer it. There was conversation. A girl's voice. "Does Mr. Porter live here?" "Si, il signorino Portaire abita qui." "Is he here now?"

"Si, si. Il signorino e nel giardino." As Giuseppina came toward him, he rose from his chair. A girl dressed in filmy white followed her. Her hair was dark and wavy and her countenance laughing-serious. Her eyes were violet. A tall, fragrant camelia flower she was. He stepped toward her. "Leonie!" he cried astounded. it can't be. Leonie Winslow!"

your picture in an old bureau of hers. You wore long, curling mustaches and a silly high collar. But you were very romantic-looking. Later, when mother wouldn't tell me who it was, I took it. Afterward I found out, and that made me all the more anxious to see you when I had the chance."

The dining-room connected with a living-room, beyond which was a sunroom. In this stood a piano.

"Can I play it?" asked Leonie. "I'd love to have you."

The

"Everybody tells me that I look like mother," she said. "I'm Leonie Paulin. You must be Holland Porter."

IV

Ar lunch she told him what brought her to look for him. And oh, what a lunch it was! Giuseppina was almost dazzled into speechlessness by the lovely Americanina. But not quite. No, not quite. Therefore, first she rushed up to Holland Porter and told him that the signorina's teeth were like pearls-come perle-and that her eyes were bellissimi, bell-ISS-imi! Then she asked him what she should give them. There was nothing in the house. Niente, niente, niente. After which she vanished to the kitchen, and a meal appeared.

Spaghetti. Firm to the teeth and a faintly tan color. A meaty brown sauce was poured over it. Chicken broiled to a melted-butter tenderness in rich yellow olive-oil. Salad. Country red wine in tall Florentine glasses, as graceful as the work of Cellini, yet as simple as primitives. Bel paese cheese and marsala. After that coffee-he had taught Giuseppina to make really tolerable coffee and cigarettes.

As they smoked their cigarettes Leonie leaned back comfortably. "I suppose you would like to know why I came here,' she said.

He nodded.

"Mother didn't send me. She wouldn't, you know. Once a long time ago I found

Be

From these she shifted to a couple of airy Italian tangos. Then she changed her mood a second time, playing selection after selection of American jazz. tween each selection she looked at him to see if he minded. He was quite absorbed. All at once she stopped.

"I've been an awful nuisance," she said. "But I've really had a wonderful time, and you've been a dear to let me bother you. Now I have to go."

"But you can't. You haven't had tea yet."

"I know. But Aunt Esther is waiting for me at our pension. She'll decide that I've been kidnapped long ago."

"Then it won't hurt her to wait a little longer. Only till tea, Miss Paulin."

"You don't know Aunt Esther. She's probably already telegraphed the King and Mussolini. I wouldn't dare."

V

AND so began for him a second period of youthfulness. Without leaving his beloved Tuscany he found that illusive Florida fountain whose waters are more precious than the gold and opals of ten El Dorados. No longer was his existence like the sound of distant silver trumpets. From the new Leonie he recovered at least a measure of what the old Leonie had taken away from him. Life, like the fine Florentine April, once again came to flower.

Every day he and Leonie did something together. They went to Certosa del Galuzzo, that sprawling monastery on a hilltop. They drove through the farm

rubbers and her platitudes and her obsession for buying things so that he could take Leonie for a five-day trip to Siena, Perugia, and Assisi, those towns among the hills.

What pleased him more than anything was that she seemed to pick out intuitively the things that made him love this multi-colored garden of Italy and love them also. Without being any less the charming and thoroughly human young lady, with a sure touch she avoided the obvious. He was surprised. "Her mother wouldn't have chosen the crimson and blue paintings of Fra Angelico," he thought. "She would have looked at pictures by the followers of Raphael. Her mother wouldn't have chosen the square