Nothing had happened; nothing was going to happen. Minna, on this unhappy day, left the house early, not intending to return to it. She had said good-bye to Fulvia the night before. As for Signor Giuseppe, she had scarcely caught so much as a glimpse of him for many days. The man contrived to hide and efface himself, as it were. Sometimes Minna was aware of a kind of slender dark shadow slipping away in the background, silent, rapid, noiseless. Once or twice she had tried to lay hold of the shadow, to say a few words to it, to force it to speak to her, but she had not been successful. She had a painful, deep conviction that Signor Giuseppe was suffering horribly; that he had probably used every persuasion, every argument that he could think of, to persuade Signora Dietrich to abandon her purpose, and that his utter failure to move or turn her aside had literally crushed him. The thought of this helpless misery made Minna suffer too. In the night, sometimes, if she awoke and began to reflect upon all that was going on, she found it was usually to him that her thoughts turned with the greatest pity and compunction. The ‘threadbare old scarecrow of a former lover of Signora Dietrich,’ Mrs. Charrington had called him; and it was a grandly contemptuous way of dismissing the whole subject. But Minna could not dismiss it. A threadbare old scarecrow (human) may suffer, and is not so well able to fight his sufferings or the cause of them as a younger and stronger man might be. She had this conviction very strongly, and would gladly have afforded consolation had it been in her power to do so, but she found no opportunity for it. He avoided her in the house, never came near the studio, and someone said that Signor Oriole was very much engaged at his office. Minna did not believe it. It was a wonderful morning, late in April--that wedding-day. As Minna made her way from Casa Dietrich to her studio, a delicious air blew upon her face. The sky was flecked with white clouds. Rain had fallen in the night, and the streets of Rome were glistening with the damp. Now it was dark, now light, under the changing sky. The endless din of the great city resounded on every side, as she walked with a heavy heart through it all. She hoped in a few hours to be many miles away from the city. She took a book and sat in the window waiting till the carriage should come for her which she had ordered on her way hither. Before the said carriage arrived, she heard a step in the corridor, a subdued knock, and then the door was opened, and Signor Giuseppe presented himself before her. A great weight fell from Minna’s heart. She had foreboded she knew not what from his silence and avoidance of her. ‘You have come,’ she exclaimed with animation, rising and going a little towards him. Then she stopped, silent, not knowing what more to say, he looked so woebegone, so utterly broken, and without heart or courage--so unlike himself.