At eleven o'clock next morning, according to his promise, he came to the hotel, and they drove out in a taxi to see some of the principal streets of London. She had chosen a dress of dark grey, which fitted her perfectly, and beneath her large black hat her fair face and blue eyes looked the perfect incarnation of innocence and ingenuousness. As he had anticipated, all was strange to her, and in everything she became deeply interested. To her, London was a revelation after the quiet idleness of Tuscany. They drove along the busy Strand, past the Law Courts, down Fleet Street with its crowd of lounging printers, and up Ludgate Hill. At St Paul's they alighted and entered the Cathedral. Its exterior was admired, but at its bare interior she was disappointed. She had expected the Duomo of London to be resplendent in gilt and silver altars, with holy pictures, but instead found a great, gaunt building, grey, silent, and depressing. Armytage noticed the blank look upon her beautiful countenance, and asked her her opinion. "It is fine, very fine," she answered in her pure Tuscan. "But how bare it is!" "This is not a Catholic country, like yours," he explained. "Here we don't believe in gaudy altars, or pictures of the Vergine Annunziata." "Are all your churches the same, Nino?" she inquired. "Are there no altars?" "Only the central one, and that is never golden, as in Italy." He pointed out to her tombs of great men about whom she had read long ago in her school days at the Convent of San Paolo della Croce, in Florence, and in them she was much interested. But afterwards, when they drove round St Paul's churchyard, into Cheapside, where the traffic was congested and progress was slow, she looked upon the mighty, crowded city with eyes wide open in wonder as a child's. At every point she indicated something which she had never before seen, and Bennett's clock striking midday caused her as much delight as if she had been a girl of twelve. Hers was an extraordinary temperament. As he sat beside her, listening to her original remarks anent things which to his world-weary eyes were so familiar as to be unnoticeable, he saw how genuinely ingenuous she was, how utterly unlike the callous adventuress which once, in Livorno, he feared her to be. To show and explain to her all the objects of interest they passed was to him an intense pleasure. They returned by way of Cannon Street, where he pointed out the great warehouses whence emanated those objects so dear to the feminine heart-- hats and dresses; past the Post Office, with its lines of red mail-carts ready to start for the various termini; along Newgate Street with its grim prison, across the Holborn Viaduct, and thence along Oxford and Regent Street to the hotel. "How busy and self-absorbed every one seems!" she again remarked. "How gigantic this city seems! Its streets bewilder me."