“It is I who should take you home.”
“Oh, I do not mind the crowd, and I know you are anxious to get back to Astorre.”
“Astorre—yes. Olive, you don’t think he looks more delicate, do you?”
The girl felt that she could not have answered truly if her life had depended on her veracity.
“Oh, no,” she said. “He is rather tired, I think. The heat tries him. He will be better later on.”
The poor mother seemed relieved.
“You are right; he is always pale in the summer,” she said, trying to persuade herself that it was so. “You will come to-morrow to tell him about the Palio?”
“Yes, surely.”
There were to be fireworks later on at the Fortezza and illuminations of the Lizza gardens, so the human tide set that way and left the outlying parts of the city altogether. The quiet, tree-shadowed piazzetta before the church of Santa Maria dei Servi was quite deserted. Children played there in the mornings, and old men and women lingered there and sat on the wooden benches in the sun, but they were all away now; the bells had rung for the Ave Maria, the church doors were closed, and the sacristan had gone to his supper.
A little mist had crept up from the valley; steep red roofs and old walls that had glowed in the sun’s last rays were shadowed as the light waned, and black clouds came up from the horizon and blotted out the stars.