A carriage passed before him through the Cascine gates, and drove down the road next the river. He followed, and when it had got a little way it stopped at the roadside, and a lady and little girl alighted, who looked about and caught sight of him, and then obviously waited for him to come up with them. It was Imogene and Effie Bowen, and the young girl called to him: “We thought it was you. Aren’t you astonished to find us here at this hour?” she demanded, as soon as he came up, and gave him her hand. “Mrs. Bowen sent us for our health—or Effie’s health—and I was just making the man stop and let us out for a little walk.”
“My health is very much broken too, Miss Effie,” said Colville. “Will you let me walk with you?” The child smiled, as she did at Colville’s speeches, which she apparently considered all jokes, but diplomatically referred the decision to Imogene with an upward glance.
“We shall be very glad indeed,” said the girl.
“That’s very polite of you. But Miss Effie makes no effort to conceal her dismay,” said Colville.
The little girl smiled again, and her smile was so like the smile of Lina Ridgely, twenty years ago, that his next words were inevitably tinged with reminiscence.
“Does one still come for one’s health to the Cascine? When I was in Florence before, there was no other place if one went to look for it with young ladies—the Cascine or the Boboli Gardens. Do they keep the fountain of youth turned on here during the winter still?”
“I’ve never seen it,” said Imogene gaily.
“Of course not. You never looked for it. Neither did I when I was here before. But it wouldn’t escape me now.”
Since he had met them he had aged again, in spite of his resolutions to the contrary; somehow, beside their buoyancy and bloom, the youth in his heart faded.
Imogene had started forward as soon as he joined them, and Colville, with Effie’s gloved hand stolen shyly in his, was finding it quite enough to keep up with her in her elastic advance.
She wore a long habit of silk, whose fur-trimmed edge wandered diagonally across her breast and down to the edge of her walking dress. To Colville, whom her girlish slimness in her ball costume had puzzled after his original impressions of Junonian abundance, she did not so much dwindle as seem to vanish from the proportions his visions had assigned her that first night when he saw her standing before the mirror. In this outdoor avatar, this companionship with the sun and breeze, she was new to him again, and he found himself searching his consciousness for his lost acquaintance with her, and feeling as if he knew her less and less. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very distinctive individuality; perhaps at her age no woman has, but waits for it to come to her through life, through experience. She was an expression of youth, of health, of beauty, and of the moral loveliness that comes from a fortunate combination of these; but beyond this she was elusive in a way that seemed to characterise her even materially. He could not make anything more of the mystery as he walked at her side, and he went thinking—formlessly, as people always think—that with the child or with her mother he would have had a community of interest and feeling which he lacked with this splendid girlhood! he was both too young and too old for it; and then, while he answered this or that to Imogene’s talk aptly enough, his mind went back to the time when this mystery was no mystery, or when he was contemporary with it, and if he did not understand it, at least accepted it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It seemed a longer time now since it had been in his world than it was since he was a child.
“Should you have thought,” she asked, turning her face back toward him, “that it would be so hot in the sun today? Oh, that beautiful river! How it twists and writhes along! Do you remember that sonnet of Longfellow’s—the one he wrote in Italian about the Ponte Vecchio, and the Arno twisting like a dragon underneath it? They say that Hawthorne used to live in a villa just behind the hill over there; we’re going to look it up as soon as the weather is settled. Don’t you think his books are perfectly fascinating?”
“Yes,” said Colville; “only I should want a good while to say it.”
“I shouldn’t!” retorted the girl. “When you’ve said fascinating, you’ve said everything. There’s no other word for them. Don’t you like to talk about the books you’ve read?”
“I would if I could remember the names of the characters. But I get them mixed up.”
“Oh, I never do! I remember the least one of them, and all they do and say.”
“I used to.”
“It seems to me you used to do everything.”
“It seems to me as if I did.
“ ‘I remember, when I think,
That my youth was half divine.’ ”
“Oh, Tennyson—yes! He’s fascinating. Don’t you think he’s fascinating?”
“Very,” said
