’I am very sorry; but I must bid you.  Sir Marmaduke will be home in the spring, and if you have anything to say to him of course you can see him.’

Then Hugh Stanbury took his leave of Mrs Outhouse; but as he went home, again on the knifeboard of an omnibus, he smoked the pipe of triumph rather than the pipe of contemplation.

CHAPTER XL

‘C.  G.’

The Miss Spaldings were met at the station at Florence by their uncle, the American Minister, by their cousin, the American Secretary of Legation, and by three or four other dear friends and relations, who were there to welcome the newcomers to sunny Italy.  Mr Glascock, therefore, who ten minutes since had been, and had felt himself to be, quite indispensable to their comfort, suddenly became as though he were nothing and nobody.  Who is there that has not felt these sudden disruptions to the intimacies and friendships of a long journey?  He bowed to them, and they to him, and then they were whirled away in their grandeur.  He put himself into a small, open hackney-carriage, and had himself driven to the York Hotel, feeling himself to be deserted and desolate.  The two Miss Spaldings were the daughters of a very respectable lawyer at Boston, whereas Mr Glascock was heir to a peerage, to an enormous fortune, and to one of the finest places in England.  But he thought nothing of this at the time.  As he went, he was meditating which young woman was the most attractive, Nora Rowley or Caroline Spalding.  He had no doubt but that Nora was the prettier, the pleasanter in manner, the better dressed, the more engaging in all that concerned the outer woman; but he thought that he had never met any lady who talked better than Caroline Spalding.  And what was Nora Rowley’s beauty to him?  Had she not told him that she was the property of some one else; or, for the matter of that, what was Miss Spalding to him?  They had parted, and he was going on to Naples in two days.  He had said some half-defined word as to calling at the American Embassy, but it had not been taken up by either of the ladies.  He had not pressed it, and so they had parted without an understanding as to a future meeting.

The double journey, from Turin to Bologna and from Bologna to Florence, is very long, and forms ample time for a considerable intimacy.  There had, too, been a long day’s journeying together before that; and with no women is a speedy intimacy so possible, or indeed so profitable, as with Americans.  They fear nothing, neither you nor themselves; and talk with as much freedom as though they were men.  It may, perhaps, be assumed to be true as a rule, that women’s society is always more agreeable to men than that of other men except for the lack of ease.  It undoubtedly is so when the women be young and pretty.  There is a feeling, however, among pretty women in Europe that such freedom is dangerous, and it is withheld.  There is such danger,