Clementina sat as if powerless to move, staring at Belsky.  He paused in his walk, and allowed an impressive silence to ensue upon his words.

“Time passed:  days, months, years; and he did not see her again.  He pursued his studies in the university; at their completion, he entered upon the course of divinity, and he is soon to be a minister of his church.  In all that time the image of the young girl has remained in his heart, and has held him true to the only love he has ever known.  He will know no other while he lives.”

Again he stopped in front of Clementina; she looked helplessly up at him, and he resumed his walk.

“He, with his dreams of renunciation, of abnegation, had thought some day to return to her and ask her to be his.  He believed her capable of equal sacrifice with himself, and he hoped to win her not for himself alone, but for the religion which he put before himself.  He would have invited her to join her fate with his that they might go together on some mission to the pagan—­in the South Seas, in the heart of Africa, in the jungle of India.  He had always thought of her as gay but good, unworldly in soul, and exalted in spirit.  She has remained with him a vision of angelic loveliness, as he had seen her last in the moonlight, on the banks of a mountain torrent.  But he believes that he has disgraced himself before her; that the very scruple for her youth, her ignorance, which made him entreat her to forget him, must have made her doubt and despise him.  He has never had the courage to write to her one word since all those years, but he maintains himself bound to her forever.”  He stopped short before Clementina and seized her hands.  “If you knew such a girl, what would you have her do?  Should she bid him hope again?  Would you have her say to him that she, too, had been faithful to their dream, and that she too—­”

“Let me go, Mr. Belsky, let me go, I say!” Clementina wrenched her hands from him, and ran out of the room.  Belsky hesitated, then he found his hat, and after a glance at his face in the mirror, left the house.

XXIV.

The tide of travel began to set northward in April.  Many English, many Americans appeared in Florence from Naples and Rome; many who had wintered in Florence went on to Venice and the towns of northern Italy, on their way to Switzerland and France and Germany.

The spring was cold and rainy, and the irresolute Italian railroads were interrupted by the floods.  A tawny deluge rolled down from the mountains through the bed of the Arno, and kept the Florentine fire-department on the alert night and day.  “It is a curious thing about this country,” said Mr. Hinkle, encountering Baron Belsky on the Ponte Trinita, “that the only thing they ever have here for a fire company to put out is a freshet.  If they had a real conflagration once, I reckon they would want to bring their life-preservers.”