Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/509



suddenly it had all broken up, Livingstone thought forlornly, their pleasant little quartet of walks and talks. He had the sensation of being left stranded by the ebbing of a tide which had seemed to buoy him up on great depths. With the disappearance of Miss Mills back to her Paris apartment, the very light had gone out of everything. Miss Allen never had had the social grace and ease of Miss Mills, and now she ate her meals silently and vanished immediately, and Crittenden, not being a social light on any occasion, was of less than no use in saving the situation. Livingstone was reduced to solitary mornings spent in museums, with a book of art criticism in his hand; or on Sunday mornings, when admission was free, on a bench in the park on the Palatine. The benches were very comfortable there, not mere backless slabs of stone, and when you felt like sight-seeing you could get up and lean over the wall and look down into the Forum and pick out where the different buildings had stood.

He stood thus, his back to the long, cypress-shaded path, trying to be archeological, his guide-book open on the wall. Which of the battered rows of stumps of pillars had been the Temple of Vesta and which the Fornix Fabianus?

He heard voices back of him. To be exact he heard Miss Allen's voice back of him. Livingstone was so paralyzed by the quality of it that, gentleman though he tried to be to the marrow of his bones, he was for an instant incapable of stirring and announcing his presence. That, Miss Allen's voice! She sounded as though she had come into a fortune. But what under the sun was she saying?

"Here, exactly here, is where we stood when you said you were like the puppy, and when you rolled the dusty weight of all those centuries off my shoulders. And now 501