David Bright, whose mistress was now enjoying his great wealth somewhere below in the old Tuscan capital.  And how could Edmund venture to be the next man offered to her?—­Edmund who had done nothing all these years, who had sunk with the opportunity of wealth; whose talents had been lost or misused.  He seemed to see Rose kneeling at her prayers—­the golden head bowed, the girlish figure bent.  He could think of nothing in himself to distract her back to earth, poor beautiful child!  Yet he had not nursed or petted or even welcomed the old passion of his boyhood.  He wanted to be without it and its discomforting reproaches.  It was too late to change anything or anybody.  At forty how could he have a career, and what good would come of it?  Yet his love for Rose was insistent on the necessity of making Rose’s lover into a different man from the present Edmund Grosse.  It was absurd and medieval to suppose that if he did some great or even moderately great work he could win her by doing it.  It might be absurd, yet contrariwise he felt convinced that she would never take him as he was now.

So he wearied as he turned on the couch that became less and less comfortable, till he rose and, with a rug thrown over him, leant on the brick balustrade of the loggia.  He stood looking at the stars in the dimness, not wholly unlike the figure of some old Roman noble in his toga, nor perhaps wholly unlike the figure of the unconverted Augustine, weary of himself and of all things.

But this remark only shows how the stars and the deep blue openings into the heavens, and the manifold suggestions of the towers of Dante’s city, and the neighbourhood of Savonarola’s cell, affect the imagination and call up comparisons by far too mighty.  Edmund Grosse’s weariness of evil is nothing but a sickly shadow of the weariness of the great imprisoned soul to whom an angel cried to take up and read aright the book of life.  Grosse is in fact only a middle-aged man in pajamas with a travelling rug about his shoulders, with a sallow face, a sickly body, and a rather shallow soul.  He will not go quite straight even in his love quest, and he cannot bring himself to believe how strongly that love has hold of him.  He is cynical about the best part of himself and to-night only wishes that it would trouble him less.

“Damn it,” he muttered at last, “I wish I had slept indoors—­I am bored to death by those stars!”

Next day Grosse set about the work for which he had come to Florence.  He called on two men whom he knew slightly, and found them at home, but neither of them had ever heard of Madame Danterre.  Dawkins, his much-travelled servant, of course, was more successful, and by the evening was able to take Edmund in a carriage to see some fine old iron gates, and to drive round some enormous brick walls—­enormous in height and in thickness.

The Villa was in a magnificent position, and the gardens, Dawkins told his master, were said to be beautiful.  Madame Danterre had only just moved into it from a much smaller house in the same quarter.