As he entered the hotel he was stopped by the porter.
"The post is in, Excellency, and there are two English letters for you."
The letters were both addressed in Mr. Grenville's handwriting, and one had been posted no less than three months before.
(2)
Dormer crumpled up the paper on which he had been scribbling and pushed it under his cushions, where he lay on a couch near a window looking out on to the Arno. The translation which he had been making of a portion of Andrewes' Preces Privatae did not please his difficult taste, and he took up instead the other book lying beside him—Serenus Cressy's edition of Father Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia, or Directions for the Prayer of Contemplation, a relic of one of his Jacobite ancestors who had afterwards become a Benedictine, which he had found, at his mother's death, among her books. He glanced at the title page, where the hand which more than a hundred years ago had written its owner's name—and his—Carolus Dormer—had traced below a cross and the family motto, 'Ciò che Dio vuole, io voglio—God's Will my will'; and began to read the chapter "Of the Great Desolation." Perhaps because he lived almost always in the conscious presence of God the description of "this most sharp purgatory of love" had for him a curious fascination.
"For what has a soul left to fear that can with a peaceable mind support, yea, and make her benefit of the absence of God Himself."
He closed the book and lay back, gazing out of the window, yet San Miniato and its cypresses were nothing but a blur....
The door opened, and the landlord admitted a tall, fair Italian, wrapped in an ample cloak.
"Do not rise, do not rise, my dear friend, I implore you!" exclaimed the visitor, swooping down upon Dormer and seizing both his hands. "And how do you find yourself this afternoon? Not in pain, I trust!"
"But I am perfectly well," protested Dormer, laughing. Accustomed as he was to these effusive greetings, he was always glad when Tristram was not by to witness them. "In a few days we, too, shall be leaving Florence."