"Ah, I'm sorry. Good-bye, my dear young friend. It's been a great pleasure to know you." Colville walked down to the door of the hotel with his visitor and parted with him there. As he turned back he met the landlord, who asked him if he would have the omnibus for the station. The landlord bowed smilingly, after his kind, and rubbed his hands. He said he hoped Colville was pleased with his hotel, and ran to his desk in the little office to get some cards for him, so that he might recommend it accurately to American families. Colville looked absently at the cards. "The fact is," he said, to the little bowing, smiling man; "I don't know but I shall be obliged to postpone my going till Monday." He smiled too, trying to give the fact a jocose effect, and added, "I find myself out of money, and I've no means of paying your bill till I can see my bankers." After all his heroic intention, this was as near as he could come to asking the landlord to let him send the money from Rome. The little man set his head on one side. "Oh, well, occupy the room until Monday, then," he cried hospitably. "It is quite at your disposition. You will not want the omnibus?" "No, I shall not want the omnibus," said Colville, with a laugh, doubtless not perfectly intelligible to the landlord, who respectfully joined him in it. He did not mean to stop that night without writing to Mrs. Bowen, and assuring her that though an accident had kept him in Florence till Monday, she need not be afraid of seeing him again. But he could not go back to his room yet; he wandered about the town, trying to pick himself up from the ruin into which he had fallen again, and wondering with a sort of alien compassion what was to become of his aimless, empty existence. As he passed through the Piazza San Marco he had half a mind to pick a pebble from the gardened margin of the fountain there and toss it against the Rev. Mr. Waters's window, and when he put his skull-cap out, to ask that optimistic agnostic what a man had best do with a life that had ceased to interest him. But, for the time being, he got rid of himself as he best could by going to the opera. They professed to give _Rigoletto_, but it was all Mrs. Bowen and Imogene Graham to Colville. It was so late when he got back to his hotel that the outer gate was shut, and he had to wake up the poor little porter, as on that night when he returned from Madame Uccelli's. The porter was again equal to his duty, and contrived to light a new candle to show him the way to his room. The repetition, almost mechanical, of this small chicane made Colville smile, and this apparently encouraged the porter to ask, as if he supposed him to have been in society somewhere-- "You have amused yourself this evening? "Oh, very much." "I am glad. There is a letter for you.' "A letter! Where?" "I sent it to your room. It came just before midnight." XIII