“There is something the matter with you,” she said gently. He pulled a leaf from the flower in his button-hole, and began tearing it to pieces. Who was it that he was so oddly like? Someone who had that same trick of the fingers and hurried, nervous gesture. “I am in trouble,” he said, looking down at his hands and speaking in a hardly audible voice. “I--don't want to be alone this evening. Will you come?” “Yes, certainly, unless you would rather go to my lodgings.” “No; come and dine with me at a restaurant. There's one on the Signoria. Please don't refuse, now; you've promised!” They went into a restaurant, where he ordered dinner, but hardly touched his own share, and remained obstinately silent, crumbling the bread over the cloth, and fidgeting with the fringe of his table napkin. Gemma felt thoroughly uncomfortable, and began to wish she had refused to come; the silence was growing awkward; yet she could not begin to make small-talk with a person who seemed to have forgotten her presence. At last he looked up and said abruptly: “Would you like to see the variety show?” She stared at him in astonishment. What had he got into his head about variety shows? “Have you ever seen one?” he asked before she had time to speak. “No; I don't think so. I didn't suppose they were interesting.” “They are very interesting. I don't think anyone can study the life of the people without seeing them. Let us go back to the Porta alla Croce.” When they arrived the mountebanks had set up their tent beside the town gate, and an abominable scraping of fiddles and banging of drums announced that the performance had begun. The entertainment was of the roughest kind. A few clowns, harlequins, and acrobats, a circus-rider jumping through hoops, the painted columbine, and the hunchback performing various dull and foolish antics, represented the entire force of the company. The jokes were not, on the whole, coarse or offensive; but they were very tame and stale, and there was a depressing flatness about the whole thing. The audience laughed and clapped from their innate Tuscan courtesy; but the only part which they seemed really to enjoy was the performance of the hunchback, in which Gemma could find nothing either witty or skilful. It was merely a series of grotesque and hideous contortions, which the spectators mimicked, holding up children on their shoulders that the little ones might see the “ugly man.” “Signor Rivarez, do you really think this attractive?” said Gemma, turning to the Gadfly, who was standing beside her, his arm round one of the wooden posts of the tent. “It seems to me----” She broke off and remained looking at him silently. Except when she had stood with Montanelli at the garden gate in Leghorn, she had never seen a human face express such fathomless, hopeless misery. She thought of Dante's hell as she watched him.