So they walked a few steps along the Lung’ Arno to the pleasant, sunny Hotel de la Grande Bretagne, which Howard had chosen for his Florentine home, and soon recrossed the Arno, and swept out through Porta Romana into the open country, behind Howard’s beautiful gray horses.

The crisp, cool air brought roses into Barbara’s and Bettina’s cheeks, and ruffled their pretty brown hair.  Malcom was in high spirits after his long confinement to the house, and Howard tried to throw off a gloomy, discouraged feeling that had hung over him all the morning.  Seated opposite Barbara, and continually meeting her frank, steadfast eyes, he seemed to realize as he had never before done the obvious truth of Mrs. Douglas’s words, when she had said that Barbara was perfectly unconscious of his love for her; and all the manhood within him strove to assert itself to resist an untimely discovery of his feeling, for fear of the mischief it might cause.

Howard had been doing a great deal of new thinking during the past weeks.  He suddenly found himself surrounded by an atmosphere wholly different from that in which he had before lived.

Sprung from an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his father’s side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother’s; brought up by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants who were the slaves of his grandmother’s and his own whims; not even his experience in the Boston Latin School, chosen because his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been educated there, had served to widen much the horizon of his daily living, or to make him anything like a typical American youth.

Now, during the last two or three months he had been put into wholly changed conditions.  An habitual visitor to this family into whose life he had accidentally entered, he had been a daily witness of Mrs. Douglas’s self-forgetting love, which was by no means content with ministering to the happiness of her own loved home ones, but continually reached out to an ever widening circle, blessing whomever it touched.  He could not be unconscious that every act of Robert Sumner’s busy life was directed by the desire to give of himself to help others; that a high ideal of beneficence, not gain, was always before him, and was that by which he measured himself.  The wealth, the position of both, served only to make their lives more generous.

And he saw that the younger people of the household had caught the same spirit.  Malcom, Margery, Barbara, and Bettina forgot themselves in each other, and were most generous in all their judgments.  They esteemed people according to that which they were in themselves, not according to what they had, and shrank from nothing save meanness and selfishness.

As we have seen, he had been attracted in a wonderful way to Barbara ever since he had first met her.  Her beauty, her unconscious pride of bearing, mingled with her sweet, unaffected enthusiasms, were a swift revelation to one who had never in his life before given a second thought to any girl; and a fierce longing to win her love had taken possession of his whole being, as he had confessed to Mrs. Douglas.