"Is this all he painted?" asked Barbara.
"There is one other fresco in the cloister of this same church, but it is sadly injured—indeed half obliterated," answered Mr. Sumner. "That is all. But his influence cannot be estimated. What he, then a poor, unknown young man, working his very best upon these walls, accomplished for the great world of painting can never be measured. He surely wrought 'better than he knew.' This was because he, for the first time in the history of modern painting, portrayed real life. All the conventionalities that had hitherto clung, in a greater or less degree, to painting, were dropped by him; and thus the way was opened for the perfect representations of the High Renaissance which so soon followed. We will next give some time to the study of the works of Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, who, with Filippino Lippi, who finished these frescoes which we have just been looking at, make a famous trio of Early Renaissance painters."
After they had crossed Ponte alla Carraja, Margery said she wished to do some shopping on Via dei Fossi, which was close at hand—that street whose shop windows are ever filled with most fascinating groups of sculptured marbles and bronzes, and all kinds of artistic bric-a-brac—and begged her uncle to accompany her.
"I wish no one else to come," she said, with her own little, emphatic nod.
"Oh, ho! secrets!" exclaimed Malcom; "so we must turn aside!"
"Do go to drive with me," begged Howard. "Here we are close to my hotel, and I can have the team ready right off."
So they walked a few steps along the Lung' Arno to the pleasant, sunny Hotel de la Grande Bretagne, which Howard had chosen for his Florentine home, and soon recrossed the Arno, and swept out through Porta Romana into the open country, behind Howard's beautiful gray horses.
The crisp, cool air brought roses into Barbara's and Bettina's cheeks, and ruffled their pretty brown hair. Malcom was in high spirits after his long confinement to the house, and Howard tried to throw off a gloomy, discouraged feeling that had hung over him all the morning. Seated opposite Barbara, and continually meeting her frank, steadfast eyes, he seemed to realize as he had never before done the obvious truth of Mrs. Douglas's words, when she had said that Barbara was perfectly unconscious of his love for her; and all the manhood within him strove to assert itself to resist an untimely discovery of his feeling, for fear of the mischief it might cause.
Howard had been doing a great deal of new thinking during the past weeks. He suddenly found himself surrounded by an atmosphere wholly different from that in which he had before lived.
Sprung from an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants who were the slaves of his grandmother's and his own whims; not even his experience in the Boston Latin School, chosen because his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been educated there, had served to widen much the horizon of his daily living, or to make him anything like a typical American youth.