The clever, cosmopolitan Mr. Berkeley Hayden tugged at his short mustache and looked astonishingly like a sulky school-boy.

“Well, if you think that’s the best thing I can do—­” he began.

“I know it is,” said she.  And she reflected that even the cleverest man, when he is really in love, is something of a fool.

Here Anne herself came in and the three dined together, a statuesque maid in a yellow bodice and a purple skirt waiting on them.  Agata’s “Si?” was like a flute-note, and the two women loved to see her moving about their rooms.  It was like having Hebe wait on them.

Anne turned to Hayden eagerly.  She wished his opinion of a piece of tapestry an antiquarian in the Via Ricasoli wished to sell her.  Would he go and look at it with her?  And there was an old lamp she fancied but of the genuineness of which she wasn’t sure.  And she added, dropping her voice, that she’d gotten a copy of one of Fra Girolamo Savonarola’s sermons, beautifully done on vellum, evidently by some loving monkish follower of his.  Didn’t he want to see it?  She looked at him eagerly.  Mrs. Vandervelde, catching his eye, smiled.

Hayden played his part beautifully, concealing the tumult of his feelings under the polished surface of the serene manner that Anne so greatly admired.  He made himself indispensable; he gave her his best, unstintedly, and Hayden at his best was inimitable.  Marcia Vandervelde regarded him with new respect and admiration.  Berkeley was really wonderful!

When he took his departure, Anne Champneys felt that the glamour of Florence had departed with him.  It was as if the sunshine had been withdrawn, along with that polished presence, that gem-like mind.  She missed him to an extent that astonished her.  She thought that even Giotto’s Campanile looked bleak, the day Berkeley Hayden left.

“I’m going to miss you hideously,” she told him truthfully.

“I hope so,” he said guardedly.  He did not wish to show too plainly how overjoyed he was at that admission.  “And I’m going to hope you’ll find me necessary in New York.  I’m looking forward to seeing you in New York, you know.  I have two new pictures I want you to see.”

Her face brightened.  “Your being there will make me glad to go back to New York,” she said happily.  And Hayden had to resist a wild impulse to shout, to catch her in his arms.  He went away with hope in his heart.

But Mrs. Vandervelde, watching her closely, thought she was too open in her regret.  N-no, Anne wasn’t in love with Hayden—­yet.  She picked up her studies, to which he had given impetus, with too hearty a zest.  And when he wrote her amusing, witty, delightful letters, she was too willing to have Marcia read them.

They remained in Italy six months or so more; and then one day Anne returned from a picnic, and said to Marcia abruptly: 

“Would you mind if I asked you to leave Florence,—­if I should want to go home?”