THERE were three of us: men between youth and middle age who had gone through school and college together, had walked the hospitals and worked in the dissecting room without a break in our friendship; and, separated by the exigencies of our practice, had still, as though by some occult sympathy, kept in touch with each other across long stretches of absence and silence. We were sitting with our coffee and cigarettes on the public walk above Florence. Before us lay the great square with the colossal David: the bronze giant that looks ever to the hills beyond the town, with his sling ready to defend her from assault; while behind us rose the church from which the creator of that giant really had protected the city against the strange-speaking North-men who had poured over those very hills for her destruction. The last gleam of sunshine was, as we knew, making the gold of the mosaic glitter over the church-door there above us. It lay too on the town at our feet, lighting up the captivating grace of the bell-tower, the chastened glow of whose marbles seemed actually before our eyes; bringing out the unsurpassable curves of the cathedral dome, and the squatter lines of that of St. Lorenzo, where the Medici moulder in their marble tombs; lingering on the graceful sturdiness of the Palazzo Vecchio; touching the spires of the church of St. Croce and of the Bargello where prisoners once pined. It was that hour before the actual sunset when the city, lying languidly amid the encircling hills, seems consciously to breathe out the suavity by which she captures her lovers and holds them to her in life-long thraldom. And two of us had been long away from our mistress; the spirit of the time and the place was upon us; confidences of loves and sorrows rose naturally to our lips. Conti flung away his cigarette and threw himself back in his chair. I glanced at his small nervous hands as he folded his arms; remembering their quick, sure movements in the most delicate operations; and then I looked into his blue eyes, whose bright sparkle the deadly habit of morphine-taking, the future ruin of that bright career, was already changing into dreaminess. “Decidedly, Neri,” exclaimed he, “you are the most changed of the three. There you sit smoking your cigarette as quietly as though we came here every day of our lives. With a line between your brows, too! You look as though you were obliged to take a wife to-morrow. What has happened? Has someone got drowned in such a way that you cannot tell whether it was a homicide or a suicide, and are afraid of misleading justice? Has a supposed corpse come to life again and objected to being dissected?”