They parted. Brian went away to his hotel, leaving the young seminarist still standing on the deck--a black figure with his pale hands crossed upon his breast in the glow of the evening sunshine, awaiting the arrival of his superior as a soldier waits for his commanding officer. Brian looked back at him once and waved his hand: he had not been so much interested in anyone for what seemed to him almost an eternity of time. Sitting sadly and alone in the hotel that night, he fell to pondering over some of the words that the young Italian had spoken, and the questions that he had asked. He wondered greatly what was the service that his father had rendered to these Italians, and blamed himself a little for not asking more about the young man's history. He knew well enough that his parents had once spent two or three years abroad--chiefly in Italy; he himself had been born in an Italian town, and had spent almost the whole of the first year of his life in a little village at the foot of the Apennines. Was it not near a place called San Stefano, indeed, that he had been nursed by an Italian peasant woman? Brian determined, in a vague and dreamy way, that at some future time he would visit San Stefano, find out the history of his new acquaintance, and see the place where he had been born at the same time. That is if ever he felt inclined to do anything of the sort again. At present--and especially as the temporary interest inspired by the young Italian died away--he felt as if he cared too little for his future to resolve upon doing anything. There was a letter waiting for him, addressed in Mr. Colquhoun's handwriting. He had not even the heart to open it and see what the lawyer had to say. Something drew him next morning towards that wonderful old building of red stone, which looks as if it were hourly crumbling away, and yet has lasted so many hundred years, the cathedral of Mainz. The service was just over; the organ still murmured soft, harmonious cadences. The incense was wafted to his nostrils as he walked down the echoing nave. There had been a mass for the dead and a funeral that morning; part of the cathedral was draped in black cloth and ornamented by hundreds of wax candles, which flared in the sunlight and dropped wax on the uneven pavement below. There was an oppressiveness in the atmosphere to Brian; everything spoke to him of death and decay in that strange, old city, which might veritably be called a city of the dead. He turned aside into the cloisters, and listened mechanically while an old man discoursed to him in crabbed German concerning Fastrada's tomb and the carved face of the minstrel Frauenlob upon the cloister wall. Presently, however, the guide showed him a little door, and led him out into the pleasant grassy space round which the cloisters had been built. He was conscious of a great feeling of relief. The blue sky was above him again, and his feet were on the soft, green grass.