It seemed his afternoon for renewing old acquaintances, for a little over a mile from Naples he was about to pass a man and a woman plodding along the dusty road when suddenly the woman raised her head from under the heavy cloth-wrapped bundle she was carrying. It was Rosa Minardi. Rodrigo at once had his car stopped. Rosa, smiling, set down her bundle, and the man with her, who was quite unencumbered and was smoking a long, curved pipe, followed her leisurely to the side of the automobile. Rosa, after the first greeting, introduced the loose-jointed, lazy-looking fellow as her husband.
She looked older, stouter, and considerably less attractive than she had when Rodrigo had last seen her. He wondered if she had really changed or whether it was because that painful scene in which her father had extorted five thousand liras from him seemed now to have taken place years, instead of months, ago, in quite another world. Certainly there seemed nothing particularly alluring about her now, though she was rolling her bright, black eyes at him hopefully and striking attitudes to display the outlines of her too buxom figure as she talked. She was finding the pose difficult, however. There were tired, aging lines under those eyes. And there was the slouching hulk of a man watching her mildly, her husband. Rosa glanced from Rodrigo to this husband, and sighed. The Minardis never had luck. Her worthless father had long since spent his tainted profits from her love affair with Rodrigo. That same worthless father had saddled this equally worthless husband upon her, with the promise that the man was rich, and had then borrowed what little money his son-in-law possessed and disappeared once more to Rome.
This, Rosa did not, of course, tell Rodrigo. Instead she said soberly, "You are looking pale, my friend, and older. Has life not been so gay in America, eh?
"Oh, it has been gay enough," he replied, and he began to admit to himself that he too must have changed, what with John and Dr. Woodward and now Rosa telling him of it.
"Do you think, then, to remain in Italy?" she asked, and he thought he detected a little gleam in those once inviting eyes.
The question having thus been put to him directly, he made a decision and said, "No. I am going to travel a while. Later—I do not know. But I am, as you have guessed, Rosa, not so gay. Perhaps in Paris or London I shall be gayer."
"You used to be—very gay," she mused, and again smiled at him coquettishly, but heavily, as if trying to say that it was not impossible that those happy times might be revived. But, though he returned her smile, she failed to stimulate him. Indeed he found her more depressing even than the palace of his fathers. Bright-eyed Rosa turned drudge, slave of a dirty, indolent Italian husband! Well, that was life. As he started on again and looked back at her, trudging under her burden along the dusty road, the man walking, hands in his pockets, by her side, Rodrigo knew that, even had she been twice as pretty as ever, she would not have struck a spark in him. His old weakness for a pretty face had been killed. And the pity of it was that it had been killed just too late.
He visited Paris, Paris striving to display its old pre-war gayety in the sunny days of a perfect spring. He looked up some old acquaintances, English and Italian artists of the Latin Quarter for the most part, and drank wine with them and talked and tried to recapture some of the old carefree spirit in the musty cafés of Montmartre. He attended the theatre, alone and in the company of his friends and browsed among the galleries and shops, making a few purchases and forwarding them to Dorning and Son. For he could not forget that he was still, in name, John's partner. He found himself frequently speculating, almost unconsciously, as to the outcome of business projects he had had under way when he left and had more than one impulse to write or cable about them. Would he, after all, go back? Dorning and Son had become even more of a part of him that he had suspected. And John and Mary—yes, he wanted that adopted world of his back again intensely already, though he had been gone hardly a month.
Yet the prospect of facing John Dorning day after day, facing his dearest friend with a guilty lie in his heart—and the ache of being near Mary and knowing she was lost to him—he could not endure that!
He crossed the Channel in May, reaching London on a wet and foggy night and establishing himself at the Savoy. For the next few days he loitered in his room, sleeping late and eating only when he felt an active hunger, and walking purposelessly about the streets. On the third evening, over a lonesome dinner, he read by chance in the paper of a play that had opened the night before. It was a problem play called "The Drifters" and, according to the reviewer, possessed considerable merit. Rodrigo was surprised and interested to see the name of Sophie Binner in the cast. Far down in the review, he read a paragraph devoted to Sophie's performance. It said that Miss Binner, late of the musical comedy stage, showed distinct promise in her first straight dramatic role, that the mannerisms which used to delight revue patrons had quite disappeared, that "the former Christy ingenue has demonstrated that she is a character actress of polished competence and, of course, outstanding beauty."