By and bye, having (to cool his anger) marched twice round the Piazza, he entered San Marco, bidding Balzatore await his return outside. In the sombre loveliness of one of the chapels a rosary was being said. Among the score or so of women kneeling there, he saw, with a strange jump of the heart, Ruth Adgate and Lady Dor.
He turned hastily away, not to spy upon their devotions. But what he had seen somehow restored the natural sweetness of things. And the vision of a delicate head bowed in prayer accompanied him home.
PART SECOND
I
PONTYCROFT was really, as men go, a tallish man,—above, at any rate, what they call the medium height,—say five feet ten or eleven. But seated, like a Turk or a tailor—as he was seated now on the lawn of Villa Santa Cecilia, and as it was very much his ridiculous custom to sit,—with his head sunk forward and his legs curled up beneath him, making a mere torso of himself, he left you rather with an impression of him as short. That same sunken head, by the by, was a somewhat noticeable head; noticeably big; covered by a thick growth, close-cropped, of fawn-coloured hair; broad, with heavy bumps over the thick fawn-coloured eyebrows; the forehead traversed by many wrinkles, vertical and horizontal, deep almost as if they had been scored with a knife. It was a white forehead, but the face below, abruptly from the hat-line, was as brown as sun and open air could burn it, red-brown and lean, showing its sub-structure of bone: not by any means a handsome face; nay, with its short nose, perilously near a snub, its forward-thrust chin, deeply-cleft in the middle, its big mouth and the short fawn-coloured moustache that bristled on the lip, decidedly a plain face; yet decidedly too, somehow, a distinguished, very decidedly a pleasing face—shrewd, humorous, friendly; capable, trustworthy—lighted by grey eyes that seemed always to be smiling.
They were certainly smiling at this moment, as he looked off towards Florence, (where it lay under a thin drift of pearl-dust in the sun-filled valley), and spoke in his smiling masculine voice.
“Up at the villa—down in the city,” he said. “I never could sympathise with that Italian person of quality. Surely, it's a thousand times jollier to be up at the villa. Then one can look down upon the city, and admire it as a feature of the landscape, and thank goodness one isn't there.”
Ruth's eyes (with the red glint in them) laughed at him. She sat leaning back on a rustic bench, a few yards away, under a mighty ilex. She wore a frock of pale green muslin, and her garden-hat had fallen on the ground beside her, so that what breeze there was could make free with her hair.