Gwen, looking fresh and bright and smart in her blue serge gown, came to me next morning, and we had our coffee together at a wayside station. Though we sat together through the morning hours until we stopped at the frontier at Modane, she refrained from referring to the reason of Mabel’s call abroad. The young girl was devoted to her sister, yet she did not wish to pain or cause me any more anxiety than was necessary.
After passing through the great tunnel, emerging on the Italian side and coming to Turin, where we waited an hour, the journey became uneventful through the afternoon and evening until the great bare station of Pisa was reached, shortly before midnight.
Here we exchanged into a very cold and very slow train which, winding its way in the moonlight through the beautiful Arno valley all the night, halted at the Florence terminus early in the glorious Italian morning.
“Fi-renze! Fi-renze!” cried the sleepy porters; and we alighted with only about half a dozen other passengers who had travelled by that treno lumaca—or snail-train, as the Tuscans justly call it.
Then, taking one of those little open cabs so beloved by the Florentines, we drove at once to the well-known hotel which faces the Arno, close to the Ponte Vecchio.
Florence, in the silence of early morning, looked delightful, her old churches and ponderous palaces standing out sharply against the clear, blue sky, while, as we passed a side street we caught sight, at the end of the vista, of the wonderful black-and-white façade of the Duomo, of Giotto’s Campanile, and Brunelleschi’s wondrous red-tiled dome.
A few moments later we stepped from the cab and entered the wide, marble-floored hall of the hotel.
“You have a Mrs Holford staying here?” I asked in English of the manager, who was already in his bureau.
“Hol-ford,” he repeated, consulting the big frame of names and numbers before him. “Ah, yes, sir; I remember! But—” He hesitated, and then inquired, “Will you pardon me if I ask who you may be?”
“I’m Henry Holford, madame’s husband,” I replied promptly.