Santa Fina and her flowers could not
soften or bring peace to his galled soul. The knowledge that the whole
situation was the result of his own doings kept his bitterness always at
white heat. The expression of his thin, haggard face was sardonic, and
the groups of simple children, accustomed to ask any stranger for stamps
for their collections--a queer habit of the place--turned away from him
when once they had looked into his eyes.
He left his motor at the hotel and wandered into the square where the
remains of the palazzos of the two great Guelph and Ghibelline families,
the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci, frown at one another not fifty yards
apart--shorn of their splendors, but the Salvucci still with two towers
from which to hurl destruction at their enemies.
John Derringham looked up at the balcony whence Dante had spoken, and
round to the Cathedral and the picturesque square. The few people who
passed seemed not in tune with his thoughts, so calm and saintly was the
type of their faces--all in keeping with a place where a house of the
sixteenth century is considered so aggressively modern as not to be of
any interest.
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