‘Probably,’ said Carry.  ’There is so very little else to bring people to Florence, that there can hardly be any other reason for his coming.  They do say it’s terribly hot at Naples just now; but that can have had nothing to do with it.’

‘We shall see,’ said Livy.  ’I’m sure he’s in love with you.  He looked to me just like a proper sort of lover for you, when I saw his long legs creeping up over our heads into the banquette.’

’You ought to have been very much obliged to his long legs so sick as you were at the time.’

‘I like him amazingly,’ said Livy, ’legs and all.  I only hope Uncle Jonas won’t bore him, so as to prevent his coming.’

‘His father is very ill,’ said Carry, ’and I don’t suppose we shall see him at all.’

But the American Minister was successful.  He found Mr Glascock sitting in his dressing-gown, smoking a cigar, and reading a newspaper.  The English aristocrat seemed very glad to see his visitor, and assumed no airs at all.  The American altogether forgot his speech at Nubbly Creek, and found the aristocrat’s society to be very pleasant.  He lit a cigar, and they talked about Naples, Rome, and Florence.  Mr Spalding, when the marbles of old Rome were mentioned, was a little too keen in insisting on the merits of Story, Miss Hosmer, and Hiram Powers, and hardly carried his listener with him in the parallel which he drew between Greenough and Phidias; and he was somewhat repressed by the apathetic curtness of Mr Glascock’s reply, when he suggested that the victory gained by the gunboats at Vicksburg, on the Mississippi, was vividly brought to his mind by an account which he had just been reading of the battle of Actium; but he succeeded in inducing Mr Glascock to accept an invitation to dinner for the next day but one, and the two gentlemen parted on the most amicable terms.

Everybody meets everybody in Florence every day.  Carry and Livy Spalding had met Mr Glascock twice before the dinner at their uncle’s house, so that they met at dinner quite as intimate friends.  Mrs Spalding had very large rooms, up three flights of stairs, on the Lungarno.  The height of her abode was attributed by Mrs Spalding to her dread of mosquitoes.  She had not yet learned that people in Florence require no excuse for being asked to walk up three flights of stairs.  The rooms, when they were reached, were very lofty, floored with what seemed to be marble, and were of a nature almost to warrant Mrs Spalding in feeling that nature had made her more akin to an Italian countess than to a matron of Nubbly Creek, State of Illinois, where Mr Spalding had found her and made her his own.  There was one other Englishman present, Mr Harris Hyde Granville Gore, from the Foreign Office, now serving temporarily at the English Legation in Florence; and an American, Mr Jackson Unthank, a man of wealth and taste, who was resolved on having such a collection of pictures at his house in Baltimore that no English private