When the boat was thus arrested in its course, Pandolfini roused himself from his fascination. He went into the little Church of the Spina, close to the river, and heard a Mass, though it was not his custom; and then he sallied forth again, and performed a multitude of little duties which he had neglected--a curious jumble. He paid a few little debts; he went and looked at some pictures which he had long forgotten; he paid a few visits--to an old _canonico_ in the cathedral, who had taught him when he was a boy, to an old servant, to a friend whom he had almost lost sight of--such visits as might be made any morning. It seemed to him afterwards that everything he had done was like the half-conscious act of a man taking leave of his old life. When the thought occurred to him it did not make him melancholy. It is only sad to take leave of a phase of life which is ending, when that to which you look forward is less happy. When it is the other way, is there not a secret exultation, a concealed happiness, even in the farewell? It was too early yet to go to Hunstanton, to inquire into his success. Englishmen are not so early as Italians, and Pandolfini remembered with a smile all the ceremonies that his friend had to get through before commencing any enterprise out of doors. First his breakfast--a meal unknown to the abstemious Tuscan, whose coffee was swallowed in two minutes; then the letters and newspapers which the post brought him; then his “business” in his study apart from the vulgar eye, a formula Mr. Hunstanton went through religiously, as if he had his estate to manage on the second floor of the Palazzo dei Sogni. All these had to be gone through--and who could tell how many more? He gazed at the great house from the other side of the river before there was any sign of waking save in the rooms under the roof, where the tenants were out upon the _loggias_, and busy with their morning occupations like the rest of their countryfolk, long before the drowsy English had opened an eyelid.