Pierre came once. He saw only the mother. When he left her he went round by way of the main street of Sorrento in order to pass a certain small inn. His carriage was waiting to take him back to Castellamare, but there was some one he wished to look at first. It was after dark; he could see into the lighted house through the low uncurtained windows, and he soon came upon the tall outline of the young farmer seated at a table, his eyes bent upon a column of figures. The Belgian surveyed him from head to foot slowly. He stood there gazing for five minutes. Then he turned away. "_That_, for Americans!" he murmured in French, snapping his fingers in the darkness. But there was a mist in his boyish eyes all the same. The pink villa witnessed the wedding. Fanny never knew how she got through that day. She was calm; she did not once lose her self-control. They were to sail directly for New York from Naples, and thence to Florida; the Italian colonists were to go at the same time. "Mamma comes next year," Eva said to everybody. She looked indescribably beautiful; it was the radiance of a complete happiness, like a halo. By three o'clock they were gone, they were crossing the bay in the little Naples steamer. No one was left at the villa with Fanny--it was her own arrangement--save Horace Bartholomew. "She won't mind being poor," he said, consolingly, "she won't mind anything--with _him_. It is one of those sudden, overwhelming loves that one sometimes sees; and after all, Fanny, it is the sweetest thing life offers." "And the mother?" said Fanny. THE STREET OF THE HYACINTH I It was a street in Rome--narrow, winding, not over-clean. Two vehicles meeting there could pass only by grazing the doors and windows on either side, after the usual excited whip-cracking and shouts which make the new-comer imagine, for his first day or two, that he is proceeding at a perilous speed through the sacred city of the soul. But two vehicles did not often meet in the street of the Hyacinth. It was not a thoroughfare, not even a convenient connecting link; it skirted the back of the Pantheon, the old buildings on either side rising so high against the blue that the sun never came down lower than the fifth line of windows, and looking up from the pavement was like looking up from the bottom of a well. There was no foot-walk, of course; even if there had been one no one would have used it, owing to the easy custom of throwing from the windows a few ashes and other light trifles for the city refuse-carts, instead of carrying them down the long stairs to the door below. They must be in the street at an appointed hour, must they not? Very well, then--there they were; no one but an unreasonable foreigner would dream of objecting.