“I sometimes feel I’ve raver left old Mr. Falx in ve lurch,” he confided uneasily to Irene on the evening of their second day in Rome. “But still, he can’t really expect me to spend all ve day wiv him, can he?” Irene agreed that he really couldn’t. “Besides,” Lord Hovenden went on, reassuring himself, “I’d really be raver out of it wiv his friends. And it’s not as if he were lonely. Vere’s such a lot of people he wants to talk to. And, you know, I fink I’d really be in ve way more van anyfing.” Irene nodded. The band struck up again. Simultaneously the two young people got up and, united, stepped off on to the floor. It was a sordid and flashy cabaret, frequented by the worst sort of international and Italian public. The women were mostly prostitutes; a party of loud and tipsy young Englishmen and Americans were sitting in one corner with a pair of swarthy young natives who looked altogether too sober; the couples who took the floor danced with an excessive intimacy. Irene and Lord Hovenden were discussing the date of their wedding; they thought the cabaret delightful. In the day-time, when Hovenden could get off going to the conferences, they wandered about the town buying what they imagined to be antiques for their future home. The process was a little superfluous. For, absorbed in the delights of shopping, they forgot that their future home was also a highly ancestral home. “Vat looks an awfully nice dinner-service,” Lord Hovenden would say; and darting into the shop they would buy it out of hand. “A bit chipped”—he shook his head. “But never mind.” Among the twenty-three valuable dinner-services with which their future home was already supplied was one of solid gold and one of silver gilt for less important occasions. Still, it was such fun buying, such fun to poke about in the shops! Under the pale blue sky of autumn the city was golden and black—golden where the sunlight fell on walls of stucco or travertine, black in the shadows, deeply black under archways, within the doors of churches, glossily black where the sculptured stone of fountains shone wet with the unceasing gush of water. In the open places the sun was hot; but a little wind from the sea blew freshly, and from the mouth of narrow alleys, sun-proof these thousand years, there breathed forth wafts of a delicious vault-like coolness. They walked for hours without feeling tired.