with kindly strength.  Body and soul revive, as the ripe grapes appear in their vine-covered baskets at the street corners.  Rich October is coming, the month in which the small citizens of Rome take their wives and the children to the near towns, to Marino, to Froscati, to Albano and Aricia, to eat late fruits and drink new must, with songs and laughter, and small miseries and great delights such as are remembered a whole year.  The first clear breeze out of the north shakes down the dying leaves and brightens the blue air.  The brown campagna turns green again, and the heart of the poor lame cab-horse is lifted up.  The huge porter of the palace lays aside his linen coat and his pipe, and opens wide the great gates; for the masters are coming back, from their castles and country places, from the sea and from the mountains, from north and south, from the magic shore of Sorrento, and from distant French bathing places, some with brides or husbands, some with rosy Roman babies making their first trumphal entrance into Rome—­and some, again, returning companionless to the home they had left in companionship.  The great and complicated machinery of social life is set in order and repaired for the winter; the lost or damaged pieces in the engine are carefully replaced with new ones which will do as well or better, the joints and bearings are lubricated, the whistle of the first invitation is heard, there is some puffing and a little creaking at first, and then the big wheels begin to go slowly round, solemnly and regularly as ever, while all the little wheels run as fast as they can and set fire to their axles in the attempt to keep up the speed, and are finally jammed and caught up and smashed, as little wheels are sure to be when they try to act like big ones.  But unless something happens to one of the very biggest the machine does not stop until the end of the season, when it is taken to pieces again for repairs.

That is the brief history of a Roman year, of which the main points are very much like those of its predecessor and successor.  The framework is the same, but the decorations change, slowly, surely and not, perhaps, advantageously, as the younger generation crowds into the place of the older—­as young acquaintances take the place of old friends, as faces strange to us hide faces we have loved.

Orsino Saracinesca, in his new character as a contractor and a man of business, knew that he must either spend the greater part of the summer in town, or leave his affairs in the hands of Andrea Contini.  The latter course was repugnant to him, partly because he still felt a beginner’s interest in his first success, and partly because he had a shrewd suspicion that Contini, if left to himself in the hot weather, might be tempted to devote more time to music than to architecture.  The business, too, was now on a much larger scale than before, though Orsino had taken his mother’s advice in not at once going so far as he might have gone.  It needed all his own restless energy, all Contini’s practical talents, and perhaps more of Del Ferice’s influence than either of them suspected, to keep it going on the road to success.