He left his motor at the hotel and wandered into the square where the remains of the palazzos of the two great Guelph and Ghibelline families, the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci, frown at one another not fifty yards apart—­shorn of their splendors, but the Salvucci still with two towers from which to hurl destruction at their enemies.

John Derringham looked up at the balcony whence Dante had spoken, and round to the Cathedral and the picturesque square.  The few people who passed seemed not in tune with his thoughts, so calm and saintly was the type of their faces—­all in keeping with a place where a house of the sixteenth century is considered so aggressively modern as not to be of any interest.  It was too late for him now to go into the Cathedral; nothing but the fortress battlements were possible, and he hobbled there, desiring to see the sunset from its superb elevation.

The gate-keeper, homely and simple, opened to him courteously, and he went in to the first little courtyard, with its fig tree in the middle and old grass-grown well surrounded by olives and lilac bushes; and then he climbed the open stairs to the bastion, from whose battlements there is to be obtained the most perfect view imaginable of the country, the like of which Benozzo Gozzoli loved to paint.

It has not changed in the least since those days, except that the tiles of the roofs, which are now dark gray with age, were then red and brilliant.  But the cypress trees still surround the monasteries, and the high hills are still crowned with castellos, while the fields make a patchwork of different crops of olives and vines and grain.

John Derringham mounted the stairs with his head down, musing bitterly, so that, until he reached the top, he was not aware that a slender girl’s figure was seated upon the old stone bench which runs round the wall.  Her hat lay upon the seat beside her, while she gazed out over the beautiful world.  He paused with a wildly beating heart in which joy and agony fought for mastery, but, as she turned to see who this stranger could be, thus breaking in upon her solitude, his voice, hoarse with emotion, said aloud her name: 

“Halcyone!”

She started to her feet, and then sank back upon the bench again unsteadily, and he came forward to her side.  They both realized that they were alone here in the sunset—­alone upon this summit of the world.

He sat down beside her and then he buried his face in his hands, letting his cap fall; and all the pent-up misery and anguish of the past weeks seemed to vibrate in his voice as he murmured: 

“Ah, God!—­my love!”

Her soft eyes melted upon him in deepest tenderness and sorrow.  To see him so pale and shattered, so changed from the splendid lover she had known!

But he was there—­beside her—­and what mattered anything else?  She longed to comfort him and tend him with fond care.  Had he been the veriest outcast he would ever have found boundless welcome and solace waiting for him in her loving heart.