“Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my emulation.  When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such bushy eyebrows.  You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast to his thumb.  I was playing at our villa gate.  You went up the path with him to see my mother—­I can see just how you looked holding so fast to that thumb!  After a while you came straying out alone.  Now don’t you remember?  Don’t you?  Something quite sensational happened.”

“No!”

“Well, I showed off what a great boy I was.  I walked on the parapet of the villa wall.  I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to his turn.”

“Yes—­yes!” she breathed, with quick-running emphasis.  Out of the mists of fifteen years had come a signal.  She bent nearer to him in the wonder of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the fascination of a communication from another world.  “You wanted me to come up on the wall,” she said, taking up the thread of the story.  “You said it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet.”

“And heavens!” he gasped, living the scene over again, “wasn’t I frightened for fear you would tumble off!”

“But I remember that you helped me down very nicely—­and—­and that is all I do remember.  What then?”

She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she tried to put the question nonchalantly.  What then?  How deep ran the current of this past association?

“Why, there wasn’t much else.  Your father came down the path and his big thumb took you in tow.  I did not see you again.  A week later mother and I had gone to Switzerland—­we were always on the move.”

The candor of his glance told her that this was all.  As boy and girl they had met under an Italian sky.  As man and woman they had met under an Arizona sky.

Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic touch.  They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past; they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter’s canvasses and enjoying Raphael’s, Botticelli’s, and Andrea del Sarto’s.  Possibly the Eternal Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair.  He could not really have known their destiny.  No, it is impossible to grant him the power of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart.

Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the hour.  To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.