McTaggart's own bathing shed was one of the last of the hundreds that had sprung up, like mushrooms, on the beach; for, in the summer months, Viareggio was packed with a gay and fashionable Italian crowd.
Close to him, hand in hand, a circle of merry bathers, in brightly striped dresses of every shape and hue, were revelling in the water, with shrill bursts of laughter, splashing up and down, like children at play.
The men with their dark hair and wet olive skins, the women in bathing caps of gay knotted silk, with bare arms and necks and that flashing smile which seems the heritage of the white-toothed Southern race, suggested a frieze of laughing fauns and nymphs, gathered from the dusty walls of far Pompeii.
McTaggart himself was burnt the color of bronze. He looked the picture of health with his sinewy, well built frame and clean-cut face in which his blue eyes struck a curious Northern note, vivid and arresting.
He loved this out-door life, with the hot, dry days and the clear nights, pine scented, cooled by the breeze that blew across the mountains but lately cleared from snow.
It was more than a year now since the memorable day when he had bidden his aunt farewell in the villa at Fiesole, mistrustful of the web of intrigue drawing round his feet and Bianca, that dark-eyed, demure convent maiden.
For the memory of Cydonia had stood him in good stead. Although little by little his bitterness had waned, it left him mistrustful both of himself and others, tinged with the easy cynicism of youth.
He had spent the whole winter at his apartment in Rome, finding a warm welcome in that gay city, as he quickly mastered his mother's tongue and took his place in the social world that opened wide its doors to him.
With the naïveté of his years he clung to the theory that his heart still lay broken at Cydonia's feet, but this did not prevent him, as the days passed on, from various flirtations in the gay Roman crowd.
He avoided, however, a serious liaison.