Part 61 (1/2)

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 Fabia.n.u.s?

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 come along. The next place in the pilgrimage is St. John Lateran, where you said, you brutal Prussian, that nothing would induce you to protect a woman!”

”Come, come, this is eavesdropping. Something must be done!” said Livingstone to himself. He shut his guide-book with a slam to give them warning, and faced about resolutely. But they had paid no attention to his warning. They stood with their backs to him, and, oh! hand in hand like rustics at a country fair. But she had called him a brutal Prussian! And a puppy!

”Ahem!” said Mr. Livingstone, loudly, not knowing what else to say.

They turned about, and saw him, and seemed neither surprised nor ashamed. Miss Allen stepped quickly towards him, smiling and saying, ”Oh, Mr. Livingstone, we were meaning to tell you anyhow.... Mr.

Crittenden and I are going to be married.”

She smiled at him dazzlingly as she spoke, but Livingstone was not at all sure from the expression of her eyes that she saw him. It crossed his mind that she would have smiled as dazzlingly as that if a lamp-post had stood in his place.

”Married!” he cried, really aghast for both of them. That sensitive, imaginative girl tied for life to that unfeeling, rough, hard fellow.

What on earth did she, even for a moment, see in him? And as for Crittenden ... any man with a little money of his own, personable enough to marry advantageously, throwing himself away on a girl without a penny either now or in prospect! To what a wretched, cramped life he was dooming himself and her ... back rooms in greasy, third-rate pensions, never any margin for decent clothes....

”Yes, and we're going to live in Ashley, Vermont.”

Livingstone sank down on his bench, appalled. Worse than third-rate pensions! Worse than the human mind could conceive!

”Oh, no! No! No!” he cried to her as though he were clutching at her as she sank to ruin. ”No! Don't say that! You've no idea ... my dear young lady, you haven't the faintest idea what an impossible life that would be. You mustn't consider it for a moment. Crittenden, you mustn't let her consider it. An American country village. Good G.o.d! You don't know what it is, what the people are!”

”Yes, I do, too,” she told him gaily, giving the effect, though she stood quite still, of executing a twirling pirouette of high spirits.