“Help me, my friend,” she said.  “How can I tell you how to be my friend?  Still it must be.  I care for you so deeply.  Let me speak, but understand me as I try to speak, and help me.  You are young and strong.  You are so companionable; I never grow tired of you—­but you must know that I am not different from you in all impulses, imaginings.  But be my friend.  Take into your being the beauty we have together; these flowers of friendship attend and keep for our garden—­our Villa d’Este.  Let it be open to the sky and wind as this is, a place where innocence and kindness may come, where children may play and the old rest.  Ah, my friend, you have lived and now be strong for me.  Uncle Tom is so fond of you.  Think of all you have.  You have had a wife, and you have a son.  Be noble, be understanding, for really you see I am poor and you are rich.  If possible these hands of passion which you have placed on mine must change, and my hands must forget what you have done.  Otherwise what is the future to be?”

Isabel began to sob, between her words crying:  “Oh, be my friend!” How could I comfort her?  The very comfort that her heart craved was that which her sorrow strove to deny me the giving.  I drew out my watch; we had long overstayed our time, for we were to lunch at the Sibylla in Tivoli.  We walked slowly to the entrance where Serafino waited for us with the carriage.  He was smoking a pipe, calm and happy, and in companionable conversation with the driver.

At a table near the Temple of Vesta here on the Castro Vetere, the waterfalls below us, Horace’s Villa above us, we dined and became happy again.

When we got back to the pension Uncle Tom was there to greet us and to receive Isabel’s kiss upon a mischievously yielded cheek, and to hear her rapturous account of the afternoon.

And I went forth with little Reverdy in the Borghese Gardens; afterwards to continue my studies of the etchings of Piranesi.

CHAPTER LIV

Isabel now took Reverdy into her heart with an ardor that could not be mistaken.  She often went to bring him from school to the pension.  She took him in walks about the broken columns of the Forum.  They clambered together over the galleries of the Coliseum and to the heights of the Palatine, exploring the ruins of the palaces of the Cesar’s.  They had walked out to the Appian Way, and gone to listen to the merles and the golden wrens among the cypresses of the Protestant cemetery.

Reverdy had begun to call Isabel “Mamma Isabel” and Isabel addressed him as “son.”  Uncle Tom fell into the same way.  The kinship between us was strengthened by these endearments.