at such times it was assuredly not fear.  He had good qualities, and courage was one of them, if courage may be called a quality at all.  Ruggiero was not at all sure that his new master liked the sea, and it is possible that the Count was not sure of the fact himself; but for the time, it suited him to sail as much as possible, because Beatrice Granmichele was fond of it, and would therefore amuse herself with excursions hither and thither during the summer.  As her mother rarely accompanied her, San Miniato could not, according to the customs of the country, join her in her boat, and the next best thing was to keep one for himself and to be as often as possible alongside of her, and ready to go ashore with her if she took a fancy to land in some quiet spot.

The Marchesa di Mola, having quite made up her mind that her daughter should marry San Miniato, and being almost too indolent about minor matters to care for appearances, would have allowed the two to be together from morning till night under the very least shadow of a chaperon’s supervision, if Beatrice herself had shown a greater inclination for San Miniato’s society than she actually did.  But Beatrice was the only one of the party who had arrived at no distinct determination in the matter.  San Miniato attracted her, and was very well in his way, but that was all.  Amidst the shoals of migratory Neapolitans with magnificent titles and slender purses, who appeared, disported themselves and disappeared again, at the summer resort, it was quite possible that one might be found with more to recommend him than San Miniato could boast.  Most of them were livelier than he, and certainly all were noisier.  Many of them had very bright black eyes, which Beatrice liked, and they were all dressed a little beyond the extreme of the fashion, a fact of which she was too young to understand the psychological value in judging of men.  Some of them sang very prettily, and San Miniato did not possess any similar accomplishment.  Indeed, in the young girl’s opinion, he approached dangerously near to being a “serious” man, as the Italians express it, and but for his known love of gambling he might have seemed to her altogether too dull a personage to be thought of as a possible husband.  It is not easy to define exactly what is meant in Italian by a “serious” man.  The word does not exactly translate the French equivalent, still less the English one.  It means something in the nature of a Philistine with a little admixture of Ciceronism—­pass the word—­and a dash of Cato Censor to sour the whole—­a delight to school-masterly spirits, a terror to lively damsels, the laughing-stock of the worldly wise and only just too wise to find a congenial atmosphere in the every-day world.  However, as San Miniato just escaped the application of the adjective I have been trying to translate, it is enough to say that he was not exactly a “serious man,” being excluded from that variety of the species by his passion for play, which was dominant, and by the incidents of his past history, which had not been dull.